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HX641 34539 
RC311.1  J15  Tuberculosis  and 


id  the 


RECAP 

TUBERCULOSIS 


AND 


THE  CREATIVE  MIND 


.is 


BY 


ARTHUR  C.  JACOBSON,  M.D. 


BROOKLYN,  N.  Y. 

ALBERT  T,  HUNTINGTON 

1909 


RC31UI 


JK" 


Columbia  (Bntoergftp 

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TUBERCULOSIS 


AND 


THE  CREATIVE  MIND 


BY 

ARTHUR  C.  JACOBSON,  M.D 


BROOKLYN,  N.  Y. 
ALBERT  T   HUNTINGTON 

1909 


:  3  ii  i  i 


Reprinted  from 

MEDICAL  LIBRARY  AND  HISTORICAL  JOURNAL 

DECEMBER,  1907 

AND    FROM 

THE  ^SCULAPIAN,  DECEMBER,  1908 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE  CREATIVE  MIND. 
By  Arthur  C.  Jacobson,  M.D., 

Brooklyn-New   York. 

"Kings  it  makes  gods,  and  meaner  creatures  kings." — Shakespeare. 
"The  sure  years  reveal  the  deep  remedial  force   that  underlies  all 
facts." — Emerson. 


I 


F  every  evil  has  its  good,  what  good  has  that  devastating 
scourge,  the  great  white  plague,  left  in  its  wake? 

For  one  thing,  it  has  left  a  fearful  lesson  upon 
insanitary  living  and  its  inevitable  penalties.1  It  has  been  a  harsh 
pedagogue  and  has  played  no  favorites.  All  mankind  must  con- 
form to  its  prescribed  curriculum,  else  prince  and  pauper  alike 
receive  the  tragic  demerit  of  tuberculous  infection. 

For  another  thing,  its  just  vengeance,  though  terrible 
enough,  is  tempered  with  mercy,  a  mercy  which,  by  way  of  com- 
pensation for  the  physical  ravages  with  which  we  are  all  so 
grewsomely  familiar,  reveals  itself  in  that  saving  grace,  the  spes 
phthisica,  a  trait  which,  with  its  associated  general  psychic 
excitation,  has  not  only  enabled  the  individual  victims  of  tuber- 
culosis to  bear  their  burdens  of  disease  most  cheerfully,  but  has 
been  a  means  of  quickening  genius,  a  fact  wherefrom  have  flowed 
benefits  that  concern  the  whole  world  of  intellect. 

Someone  has  said  that,  next  to  the  Newgate  Calendar,  the 
biography  of  authors  is  the  most  sickening  chapter  in  the  history 
of  man.  Heaven  knows  that  Nordau  has  illumined  the  subject 
from  his  peculiar  point  of  view.  Some  phases  of  the  chapter  are 
especially  sickening  to  medical  men,  as  for  example  De  Quincey's 
expressed  admiration  of  the  hydrocephalic  head  of  his  sister: 
" — thou  whose  head,  for  its  superb  intellectual  developments,  was 
the  astonishment  of  science, —  *  *  *.  For  thou,  dear  noble 
Elizabeth,  around  whose  ample  brow,  as  often  as  thy  sweet  coun- 
tenance rises  upon  the  darkness,  I  fancy  a  tiara  of  light,  or  a 
gleaming  aureola,  in  token  of  thy  premature  intellectual  grandeur 
— thou    *     *     *  pillar  of  fire,"  etc.  Again,  the  face  of  Christina 

1  Tuberculosis  imposes  upon  the  United  States  alone  an  annual  loss 
of  about  $200,000,000.     (Osier's  "Modern  Medicine.") 


4  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

Rossetti  became  the  type  of  a  certain  anemic  ideal  of  pre- 
Raphaelite  female  beauty.  She  was  a  model  for  Dante  Gabriel 
Rossetti,  Ford  Madox  Brown  and  Holman  Hunt.  Now  the  chief 
feature  of  her  face,  worshipped  by  the  pre-Raphaelites  because  of. 
a  certain  pensive,  wistful,  melancholy  expression,  was  her  eyes. 
To  these  hysterical  esthetes  this  spelled  transcendent  beauty,  yet 
the  horridly  matter-of-fact  explanation  of  it  all  was  exophthalmic 
bronchocele,  which  afflicted  her  in  April,  1871,  lasted  two  years, 
and  from  the  distressing  effects  of  which  she  never  recovered. 
The  condition  is  especially  manifest  in  D.  G.  Rossetti's  drawing 
of  Christina  and  her  mother. 

As  the  litterateur  or  artist  may,  occasionally,  be  inspired  in 
the  above  manner  by  pathologic  objects  outside  of  himself,  so,  too, 
his  own  psychopathology  may  inspire  him  to  creative  labors,  or  at 
least  color  his  productions ;  thus  it  is  easy  to  discern  the  influence 
of  psychopathologic  states  upon  the  works  of  such  writers  as 
Poe,  Guy  deMaupassant,  Tasso,  Cowper,  Swift,  Byron  and  St. 
John  the  Evangelist.  The  morbid  imaginings  of  the  first  and 
second,  the  coprolalia  of  Swift,  the  illusions  and  hallucinations  of 
St.  John,  the  melancholia  of  Cowper,  as  reflected  by  their  writ- 
ings, are  symptomatic  of  unhealthy  mental  states.  Even  the 
pure  mind  of  Tennyson  had  its  moments  of  regrettable  aberra- 
tion, for  to  what  else  can  we  ascribe  his  characterization  of  Lord 
Lytton,  than  which  it  would  be  hard  to  find  anything  nastier: 

"What  profits  now  to  understand 
The  merits  of  a  spotless  shirt — 
A   dapper  boot — a   little  hand — 
//  half  the  little  soul  is  dirt?     .     .     ." 

Who  is  there  familiar  with  only  the  beauties  of  Tennyson's  mind 
and  verse  that  would  suspect  him  of  having  been  possessed  of 
such  a  talent  for  vileness?  There  was  more  need  at  such  a 
moment  for  a  few  grains  of  calomel  than  for  a  poem. 

Now  it  is  entirely  conceivable  that  the  tuberculous  by- 
products are  capable  of  profoundly  affecting  the  mechanism 
of  creative  minds  in  such  a  way  as  to  influence  markedly  the 
creations.  Indeed,  they  are  bound  to  do  so,  for  the  spes 
phthisica,  admittedly  a  result  of  such  by-products,  must  neces- 
sarily affect  the  whole  psychological  switchboard.  This  is  all 
that  the  present  writer  seeks  to  establish.  Yet  he  does  not 
maintain  that  it  is  possible  to  reason  backward  and  to  say,  of  given 
passages,  "these  were  written  by  one  afflicted  with  tuberculosis." 
The  pathologist  likes  to  know  the  clinical  history  of  the  cancer 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  5 

suspect  from  whose  growth  scrapings  have  been  taken  before 
he  pronounces  his  judgment.  No  neurologist  could  name 
Cowper's  malady,  however  much  he  might  suspect  a  mental 
twist,  even  after  the  most  careful  study  of  his  poems,  but, 
knowing  the  man's  pathetic  life  struggle  with  the  depression 
which  finally  overwhelmed  him,  its  influence  upon  his  writings 
becomes  a  self-evident  proposition. 

Dana,  in  his  "Nervous  Diseases,"  gives  "an  almost  sure 
recipe  for  producing  a  case  of  paresis."  A  man  of  nervous 
constitution  and  dissipated  habits  acquires  syphilis  between  the 
ages  of  twenty  and  thirty.  He  continues  to  drink  alcohol  to 
excess  and  to  play  the  game  of  life  hard.  In  ten  or  fifteen 
years  he  will  be  pretty  sure  to  have  paresis.  Similarly,  were 
the  present  writer  to  give  an  almost  sure  recipe  for  producing 
the  highest  type  of  the  creative  mind,  he  would  postulate  an 
initial  spark  of  genius  plus  tuberculosis. 

It  is  natural  to  think,  a  priori,  that  the  pathological  can 
account  for  little  in  literature  or  in  art  except  the  morbid,  the 
abnormal,  the  depressed.  This  is  doubtless  true  in  the  main, 
but,  a  posteriori,  we  must  except  tuberculosis.  Certain  cele- 
brated victims  have  been,  par  excellence,  the  creators  of  the 
highest  and  best.  The  layman,  unfamiliar  with  the  curious 
mental  trait  of  consumptives  already  alluded  to,  will  be  apt  to 
reason  that  such  men  accomplished  great  things  despite  their 
infirmity,  and  that  had  they  not  been  hampered  by  it,  they  would 
have  accomplished  still  greater  ones.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
physician  will  find  the  explanation  to  lie  most  readily  in  that 
characteristic  clinical  trait  of  the  tuberculous,  the  spes 
phthisical  Their  lives  are  shortened,  physically,  but  quickened 
psychically  in  a  ratio  inversely  as  the  shortening.  The 
layman's  reasoning  is  sound  in  a  general  sense,  fallacious  in  a 
particular  sense.  Relatively  abnormal  hopefulness,  optimism, 
buoyancy,  represent  the  prevailing5  psychologic  phase  of  tuber- 
culosis. Out  of  this  closely  related  trinity,  too,  grows  the 
factitious  physical  energy  of  the  victims.  Upon  his  death-bed 
the    consumptive   makes   plans    for   twenty   years    ahead.     Far 

2  "Death  catches  him  like  an  open  pitfall,  and  in  mid-career,  laying 
out  vast  projects,  and  planning  monstrous  foundations,  flushed  with  hope, 
and  his  mouth  full  of  boastful  language." 

"Some  dispositions  seem  as  the  disease  advances  to  become  so  ethereal 
that  they  suggest  another  sphere." 

3  States  of  depression  do  occasionally  occur.  (Exemplified  by  Keats, 
Stevenson,  Schiller.) 


6  ARTHUR   C.   JACOBSON. 

advanced  in  disease,  he  crosses  an  ocean  in  the  steerage  and  a 
continent  in  an  emigrant  train  in  quest  of  a  sick  friend  (Robert 
Louis  Stevenson),  or  acts  superbly  in  the  theater  on  the  day 
of  his  death  (Moliere).  Every  practitioner  is  familiar  with 
the  extraordinary  trait  which  enables  the  advanced  consumptive 
to  declare  that  he  feels  "bully"  when  his  temperature  is  1040, 
which  enables  him  to  walk  about,  to  work,  and  fully  to  exercise 
the  sexual  function.4  In  no  other  disease  with  equally  extensive 
lesions  is  the  psychical  and  consequently  the  physical  status 
equally  exalted,  or,  we  might  truly  say,  exalted  at  all.  Potential 
indeed  must  be  the  mental  driving  force  which  gets  power  out 
of  a  pitiable  wreck. 

The  writer  has  chosen  all  his  concrete  examples  from 
among  the  litterateurs,  for  the  reason  that  it  was  necessary  to 
limit  the  study,  unless  he  were  to  write  a  rather  huge  book,  so 
numerous  have  been  the  instances  among  all  classes  of  creative 
minds.  Thus,  in  the  domain  of  art,  he  might  have  discussed 
the  cases  of  Raphael,  of  Bastien-Lepage,  of  Jacquemart,  of 
Trutat,  of  Habington,  of  Henry  O'Neil,  of  W.  H.  Deverell,  or  of 
Watteau,  who  shaped  the  art  of  eighteenth  century  France. 
From  among  musical  geniuses  he  might  have  selected  Paganini, 
Von  Weber,  Chopin,  Nevin  and  Purcell;  from  among  dramatic 
artists,  Rachel;  from  among  physicians,  Laennec,  Bichat,  Rush, 
Trudeau,  Godman  and  William  Pepper  (secundus) ;  from 
among  theologians,  John  Calvin ;  from  among  statesmen,  Cicero ; 
and  from  among  empire  builders,  Cecil  Rhodes.  The  great 
lights  of  literature  have  been  selected  for  this  reason  and  because 
of  the  writer's  entire  belief  in  the  aphorism  of  Dr.  Johnson,  to 
wit:     "The  chief  glory  of  every  people  arises  from  its  authors." 

To  be  sure,  tuberculosis  doesn't  convert  all  talented  persons 
into  geniuses,  nor  mediocre  people  into  talented  ones.  More- 
over, many  geniuses  have  not  been  tuberculous.  Again, 
tuberculosis  is  not  infrequently  a  result,  and  not  a  cause,  of 
literary  industry,  although  in  such  instances  it  may  prove  to  be 
an  intellectual  asset.  Right  here  the  writer  will  say  that  he  is 
not  attempting  to  do  anything  more  than  to  reason  inductively 

*  Sidney  Lanier's  four  children  were  all  born  during  the  active  period 
of  his  disease.  "The  final  consuming  fever  opened  in  May,  1880.  In 
July  he  went  with  Mrs.  Lanier  and  her  father  to  Westchester,  Pa.,  where 
a  fourth  son  was  born  in  August.  *  *  *  This  winter  brought  a  hand- 
to-hand  battle  for  life.  In  December  he  came  to  the  very  door  of  death." 
— William  Hayes  Ward. 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  J 

from  certain  facts.  This  reasoning  is  governed  only  by  the 
probable.  It  is  the  same  reasoning  that  we  apply  to  all  the 
phenomena  of  disease.  Were  we  to  abandon  such  a  method 
we  would  end  by  questioning  the  validity  of  nearly  all  those 
postulates  upon  which  modern  medicine  is  founded,  when  as  a 
matter  of  fact  we  know  that  these  postulates  enable  us  to  solve 
bedside  problems  very  successfully.  They  work  well.  Thus 
we  would  question  the  relation  of  syphilis  to  general  paralysis 
and  locomotor  ataxia.  This  disease,  we  would  say,  doesn't 
always  produce  those  quartenary  sequelae  in  its  victims.  Such 
terminations  are  the  exception,  not  the  rule.  Moreover,  there  are 
paretics  and  tabetics  in  whom  the  fact  of  antecedent  specific 
disease  cannot  be  established. 

This  subject  might  be  considered  from  four  points  of  view. 
First,  from  that  which  considers  only  the  man  of  genius  suffer- 
ing from  tuberculosis  in  its  frankest  and  most  active  form; 
second,  from  that  which  considers  the  man  of  genius  who  has 
been  afflicted  at  some  early  period  in  his  life,  and  who  has 
apparently  recovered,  e.  g.,  Sir  Walter  Scott;  third,  from  that 
which  considers  the  man  of  genius  who  is  of  the  phthisical  habit 
and  who  may  (Thoreau,  Merimee,  and  the  author  of  "Hudibras") 
or  may  not  (Edward  Gibbon,  Leopardi)  develop  actual  consump- 
tion; and  fourth,  from  that  which  considers  the  man  or  woman 
of  genius,  apparently  not  tuberculous,  as  a  product  of  admittedly 
tuberculous  stock,  e.  g.,  Robert  Burns,  Edgar  Allan  Poe,  Eugenie 
de  Guerin,  J.  A.  Froude,  Sainte-Beuve,  Franqois  Coppee,  John 
Stuart  Mill,  William  Cullen  Bryant,  Harriet  Martineau,  Byron, 
Charles  Dickens.  If  we  take  the  broad  ground  covered  by  all 
four  of  these  viewpoints  we  have  much  indeed  upon  which  to  base 
our  study.  The  bearing  of  the  last  upon  the  subject  the  author 
leaves  mainly  to  the  reader's  own  conjecture;  that  of  the  second 
and  third  he  includes  in  his  study  in  tentative  fashion;  that  of 
the  first  he  founds  his  thesis  upon  with  no  doubt  in  his  own  mind 
as  to  its  absolute  relevance. 

This  matter  of  tuberculous  stock  cannot  be  lightly  dismissed. 
While  we  must,  perhaps,  accept  Weismann's  anti-Lamarckian 
teaching  that  the  acquired  characteristics  of  parents  do  not 
become  the  natural  ones  of  the  offspring,  that  is  to  say,  are  not 
actually  transmitted,  yet  we  are  not  obliged  to  believe  that  such 
acquired  characteristics  are  without  influence  of  any  sort  upon 
the  offspring.  However,  there  is  no  use  of  engaging  in  a  discus- 
sion that  would  trench  closely  upon  the  academic. 


8  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

II. 

We  shall  now  proceed  directly  to  a  study  of  those  literary 
geniuses  in  whom  tuberculosis  appears  to  have  been  a  more  or 
less  direct  factor  in  exciting,  if  not  inaugurating,  creative  ideas 
of  the  highest  order.5  We  cannot,  of  course,  account  in  this  way 
for  superb  technique,  nor  perhaps  in  any  case  for  the  initial  spark 
of  genius.  We  merely  predicate  it,  then,  to  be  a  quickener,  excit- 
ant or  inspirer  of  germinating  or  flowering  faculties  of  extra- 
ordinary potentiality,  which  even  without  its  influence  would 
have  marked  their  possessors  as  men  of  remarkable  talent  or 
moderate  genius. 

John  Milton. — The  picture  of  "John  Milton  at  the  Age  of 
Twelve,"  in  the  collection  of  the  Provost  of  Eton  College,  re- 
veals his  fragile,  spiritual  type  of  beauty  as  a  child.  The  mature 
Milton  is  revealed  as  a  sickly,  hollow-cheeked  man  in  the  Faith- 
orne  engraving,  after  the  crayon  portrait  at  Bayfordbury  (see 
also  the  George  Vertue  engraving). 

Milton  was  known  at  Cambridge  as  "The  Lady  of  Christ's," 
because  of  his  delicate  beauty. 

He  was  buried  at  St.  Giles's,  Cripplegate,  and  in  the  burial 
registers  of  this  church  is  to  be  found  the  entry :  "John  Milton, 
gentleman,  consumption,  chancel." 

John  Locke. — The  author  of  the  "Essay  Concerning  the 
Human  Understanding"  was  also  the  author  of  an  "Essay  on 
Tussis,"  inspired  by  his  personal  interest  in  the  subject  of  cough. 

While  writing  the  famous  treatises  on  psychology,  religion, 
education,  government  and  finance  which  have  exercised  such  a 
remarkable  influence  on  the  world's  progress  and  civilization, 
Locke  was  all  the  time  a  victim  of  tuberculosis.  Great  Syden- 
ham, the  English  Hippocrates,  with  whom  he  was  closely  asso- 
ciated in  medical  practice  (Locke  was  a  physician),  tried  hard  to 
cure  him. 

5  It  is  impossible  always  to  secure  definite  data  as  to  the  illnesses  of 
famous  literary  geniuses.  Many  are  said  to  have  died  of  "declines,"  of 
"general  breakdowns  of  the  system,"  of  "pulmonary  affections,"  of  "wast- 
ing diseases,"  of  "continued  coughs  and  fevers,"  of  "catarrhal  affections," 
"throat  troubles,"  etc.,  etc.  Much  may  be  roughly  inferred  from  all  this. 
Even  the  records  left  by  physicians  are  usually  inexact  and  unscientific. 
Tuberculosis  has  also  been  regarded  as  a  sort  of  stigma,  hence  is  some- 
times deliberately  veiled  under  other  terms.  There  are  good  reasons  for 
inferring  that  Louis,  the  great  French  clinician,  and  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
were  both  phthisical  in  their  young  manhood. 


TUBERCULOSIS   AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  9 

The  Burrower  portrait  reveals  the  physiognomy  and  physique 
which  we  associate  with  the  phthisical  diathesis. 

Alexander  Pope. — Pope  was  a  victim  of  Pott's  disease  of  the 
spine.  Morley  notes  that  his  father  was  similarly  deformed. 
The  immediate  causes  of  his  death  were  asthma  and  dropsy. 
He  had  a  "crazy  carcase."  At  seventeen  he  very  nearly  died. 
"Let  those  who  judge  him,"  say  Garnett  and  Gosse,  "read  the 
account  of  that  long  disease,  his  life."  He  required  to  be  lifted 
out  of  bed,  and  could  not  stand  until  he  was  laced  into  a  sort 
of  armor.  He  described  himself  as  "a  lively  little  creature, 
with  long  legs  and  arms;  a  spider  is  no  ill  emblem  of  him;  he 
has  been  taken  at  a  distance  for  a  small  windmill."  Always  a 
sick  man,  we  may  suspect  that  the  tuberculous  fires  smouldered 
throughout  his  life.  Sufficient  by-products  were  perhaps 
liberated  to  act  as  a  kind  of  lash  to  what  would  have  been  an 
extraordinary  mind,  even  if  its  possessor  had  had  a  normal 
body. 

Dr.  Samuel  Johnson. — Johnson  was  afflicted  throughout 
much  of  his  life  by  what  appears  to  have  been  lupus  vulgaris. 
This  was  the  cause  of  the  unsightly  scars  which  marked  his 
face.  His  health  was  always  precarious,  because  of  his 
"scrofulous  taint,"  as  it  was  then  called.  He  came  of  "scrofu- 
lous" stock. 

Sir  Walter  Scott. — Although  Scott  died  at  the  age  of  sixty- 
one,  after  a  life  of  prodigious  industry,  his  health  was  not 
always  good.  He  seems  to  have  maintained  it  only  by  much 
exercise  and  care.  It  is  true  that  he  was  tall  and  that  his  chest 
and  arms  were  powerfully  developed.  In  1788,  when  he  was 
about  seventeen  years  of  age,  Scott  had  a  pulmonary  hemor- 
rhage, which  was  followed  by  a  lengthy  illness.  Previous  to 
this,  when  a  child  of  eighteen  months,  Scott  had  what  his 
surgeon,  Dr.  Charles  Creighton,  called  "a  swelling  at  the  ankle." 
It  was  this  affliction  which  left  him  partially  crippled.  The 
distressing  physical  conditions  under  which  he  wrote  "Ivanhoe" 
and  the  "Bride  of  Lammermoor"  do  not  appear  to  have  been 
related  to  his  tuberculous  troubles.  One  of  the  children  of  his 
daughter  Sophia  (Mrs.  Lockhart)   died  of  tuberculosis. 

Percy  Bysshe  Shelley. — Shelley  sank  into  incipient  phthisis 
in  1817.  His  health  had  "failed"  in  1815.  He  went  to  Italy 
on  account  of  his  health  in  18 18.  To  this  period  belong 
"Rosalind  and  Helen,"  "The  Cenci"  and  "Prometheus 
Unbound,"  "To  a  Skylark,"  "Oedipus  Tyrannus,"  "Epipsychi- 


IO  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

dion,"  "Ode  to  the  West  Wind,"  "Adonais,"  "Hellas"  and  the 
unfinished  "Triumph  of  Life."  These  certainly  represent  his 
most  "soaring  thought."  He  was  drowned  in  July,  1822.  "No 
greater  gift  to  poetry  was  ever  given  by  a  poet  within  a  twelve- 
month than  Shelley's  gift  of  1819." 

John  Keats. — Keats' s  mother  died  of  tuberculosis.  In 
December,  1818,  his  brother  Tom,  tenderly  nursed  by  the  poet, 
succumbed  to  the  same  disease.  (He  had  also  nursed  the 
mother.)  By  the  autumn  of  1819,  after  twenty  months  of 
wonderful  work,  "an  achievement  unparalleled  in  the  history 
of  English  poetry,  Keats  had  produced  almost  all  the  works 
on  which  his  fame  rests."  He  died  on  February  23,  1821. 
The  breaking  down  of  his  health  dated  from  the  time 
of  Tom's  death.  He  was  eager,  enthusiastic,  resolute.  He 
speaks  of  "the  violence  of  his  temperament."  Of  him  it 
may  be  truly  said,  using  his  own  phrases,  that  he  "died  into 
life,"  destroyed  by  "the  fever  and  the  fret."  Other  great 
poets  have  warmed  themselves  at  the  fire  of  Keat's  genius 
and  gained  much  of  their  own  inspiration  therefrom.  Among 
them  have  been  Hood,  Tennyson,  Rossetti,  Morris,  Coleridge, 
and  a  whole  host  besides.  He  still  strongly  influences  much  of 
the  poetry  of  to-day.  He  may  be  credited,  then,  in  a  sense, 
with  a  large  share  of  the  parentage  of  many  of  our  greatest 
poems.  "His  influence  may  be  traced  in  the  tendencies  to 
choose  subjects  from  Greek  mythology,  to  describe  nature 
imaginatively  but  without  much  of  the  Wordsworthian  spirit- 
uality, to  saturate  language  with  color,  and  to  aim  at  felicity 
of  phrase.     It  is  also  visible  in  many  paintings." 

Thomas  Hood. — "A  tendency  to  consumption  on  the 
mother's  side,  fatal  to  three  of  her  children  and  ultimately  to 
herself,  was  at  the  root  of  those  complicated  disorders  which 
made  the  life  of  Thomas  Hood  'one  long  disease.' "  "The 
Song  of  the  Shirt"  (Christmas  number  of  Punch,  1843),  "The 
Haunted  House,"  "The  Lay  of  the  Labourer"  and  "The  Bridge 
of  Sighs"  were  all  written  at  a  time  when  his  disease  was  almost 
in  the  terminal  stage,  "proving  that,  as  the  darkness  of  his  own 
prospects  deepened,  the  sympathies  with  his  kind  deepened  also, 
and  quickened  his  finest  genius." 

Laurence  Sterne. — Sterne's  health  broke  about  the  time  of 
his  first  success  (the  two  first  volumes  of  "Tristram  Shandy"). 
"The  Sentimental  Journey"  was  published  on  February  28,  1768, 
and  Sterne  died  of  consumption  on  March  18  of  the  same  year. 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  II 

He  was  one  of  a  very  large  family,  most  of  whom  died  in  early 
childhood.  His  father  died  in  1731  of  an  "impaired 
constitution." 

The  "Journey"  through  France  and  Italy  was  undertaken 
in  1765,  in  an  attempt  to  prolong  his  life. 

Of  the  temperament  of  Sterne,  no  better  summary  can  be 
given  than  is  provided  by  himself,  when,  after  describing  some 
misfortune,  he  says :  "But  I'll  lay  a  guinea  that  in  half-an-hour 
I  shall  be  as  merry  as  a  monkey,  and  forget  it  all." 

"His  unseemly,  passionate,  pathetic  life  burned  itself  away 
at  the  age  of  fifty-four,  only  the  last  eight  of  which  had  been 
concerned  with  literature"   (Garnett  and  Gosse). 

Thomas  De  Quincey. — "De  Quincey,  a  dreamer  of  beautiful 
dreams,  *  *  *  sought  with  intense  concentration  of  effort 
after  a  conscientious  and  profound  psychology  of  letters." 
From  our  point  of  view  the  psychology  of  a  great  intellect  as 
modified  by  tuberculosis  plus  opium.6 

By  some  it  is  felt  that  this  very  drug  habit  actually 
hindered,  in  some  way,  the  full  expression  of  De  Quincey's 
genius.  His  biographer  Page  says  that  "he  did  not  become  a 
dreamer  because  he  fell  under  the  spell  of  opium,"  and  De 
Quincey  himself  says :  "Habitually  to  dream  magnificently,  a 
man  must  have  a  constitutional  determination  to  reverie." 

De  Quincey's  father  died  of  tuberculosis  and  a  sister  of 
tuberculous  meningitis. 

Surgeon-Major  W.  C.  B.  Eatwell,  who  studied  De  Quincey 
from  a  medical  standpoint,  points  out  certain  manifestations  of 
tuberculosis  in  a  cerebral  form  in  De  Quincey's  childhood.  He 
showed  decided  evidences  of  the  disease  still  later.  De  Quincey 
himself,  in  the  "Confessions,"  says  that  before  he  wrote  that 
book  he  had  been  pronounced  repeatedly  a  martyr-elect  to  pul- 
monary consumption.  "Without  something  like  a  miracle  in 
my  favor,  I  was  instructed  to  regard  myself  a  condemned 
subject.  *  *  *  These  opinions  were  pronounced  by  the 
highest  authorities  in  Christendom.  *  *  *  Out  of  eight 
children  I  was  the  one  who  most  closely  inherited  the  bodily 
conformation  of  a  father  who  had  died  of  consumption  at  the 
early  age  of  thirty-nine.  *  *  *  I  offered  at  the  first  glance 
to  a  medical  eye  every  symptom  of  phthisis  broadly  and  con- 

8  Gerrier,  of  Lyons,  questions  De  Quincey's  statements  anent  the  influ- 
ence of  opium  upon  him,  since  his  descriptions  of  opium  symptoms  are 
more  than  inexact;  they  are  false. 


12  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

spicuously  developed.  The  hectic  colours  in  the  face,  the 
nocturnal  perspirations,  the  growing  embarrassment  of  the 
respiration,  and  other  expressions  of  gathering  feebleness  under 
any  attempts  at  taking  exercise,  all  these  symptoms  were  steadily 
accumulating  between  the  ages  of  twenty-two  and  twenty-four." 

He  thought  that  the  use  of  opium  in  some  way  stopped  the 
further  progress  of  his  malady,  although  he  had  no  such  notion 
in  his  mind  when  he  began  its  use.  It  was  first  taken  to  relieve 
a  neuralgia. 

De  Quincey  died  at  the  age  of  seventy-five  of  what  his 
physician,  Dr.  Warburton  Begbie,  describes  as  a  catarrhal, 
febrile  affection  of  the  chest  with  exhaustion  of  the  system. 
The  doctor  attended  him  from  October  22,  1859,  to  December  8 
of  the  same  year. 

"The  Confessions"  were  written  at  the  age  of  thirty-seven. 

Elisabeth  Barrett  Browning. — Mrs  Browning's  "lung 
affection"  began  in  1836,  at  the  age  of  thirty.  A  pulmonary 
hemorrhage  occurred  in  1837.  The  trouble  has  been  described 
as  a  "bronchial  affection."  Again,  biographers  characterize 
it  as  "grave  mischief  in  the  lungs."  Spinal  trouble,  which  we 
may  suspect  to  have  been  tuberculous  spondylitis,  is  also 
mentioned.  This  would  seem  to  be  an  instance  in  which,  for 
some  reason,  those  in  possession  of  the  exact  facts  seem  to 
regard  candor  as  inappropriate.  The  security  of  her  fame  and 
the  loveableness  of  her  character  only  make  this  reticence  the 
more  priggish.  Her  life  of  invalidism  and  of  great  achievement 
is  familiar  to  all.     Obiit  1861. 

Kate  Field  said  that  it  was  difficult  to  believe  that  such  a 
fairy  hand  could  pen  thoughts  of  such  ponderous  weight. 

Moliere. — Moliere  was  quite  a  typical  example  of  the 
tuberculous  diathesis7  and  died  of  hemorrhage  after  years  of 
semi-invalidism  on  February  17,  1673.  Only  death  itself,  how- 
ever, interrupted  his  brilliant  career  as  actor  and  author. 

Henry  Thoreau. — The  health  of  Thoreau,  another  quite 
typical  example  of  the  tuberculous  diathesis  throughout  his 
strange  life,  failed  completely  in  1861.     Died  1862. 

"In  Thoreau,  *  *  *  it  was  the  spirit  more  than  the 
temple  in  which  it  dwelt,  that  made  the  man."     (Ricketson.) 

7  In  many  instances  it  is  unquestionably  correct  to  state  that  the  so- 
called  phthisical  habit  is  not  an  indication  of  a  tendency  to,  but  actually 
of  the  existence  of,  tuberculosis  (Cohnheim — Osier).  Those  recent  addi- 
tions to  our  diagnostic  resources,  the  Von  Pirquet,  the  Moro  and  the  Cal- 
mette  or  Wolff-Eisner — Vallee  tests,  have  many  times  confirmed  this 
teaching. 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  13 

Johann  Christian  Friedrich  Schiller. — Schiller's  fatal  sick- 
ness began  in  the  summer  of  1804.  He  died  on  May  9,  1805. 
On  the  eighth,  when  asked  how  he  felt,  he  replied,  evidently 
referring  to  his  mental  state,  "Better  and  better,  more  and  more 
cheerful."  Again  he  said,  with  characteristic  optimism,  "Death 
can  be  no  evil,  for  it  is  universal." 

Some  doubt  is  expressed  by  Schiller's  biographers  as  to 
whether  he  really  had  phthisis.  There  appear  to  have  been  some 
anomalous  symptoms.  The  writer  has  studied  the  available  data 
very  carefully  and  he  finds  it  impossible  to  surmise  what  the 
disease  was  if  it  was  not  phthisis.  Even  his  very  typical  spes 
phthisica  was  not  the  most  characteristic  of  the  cardinal  symp- 
toms. There  would  appear  to  be  no  occasion  for  befogging 
the  facts  other  than  the  one  exemplified  by  the  biographers  of 
Mrs.  Browning.  Still,  we  must  not  forget  that  in  those  days 
the  specific  bacillus  had  not  been  isolated — nor  was  the  art  of 
medicine  unimpeachable. 

His  first  attack  of  blood-spitting  occurred  in  1791.  He 
never  entirely  recovered  and  this  first  attack  was  in  reality  his 
sentence  of  death.  He  was  then  thirty-two.  At  the  time  of  his 
death  he  was  forty-six.  "It  is  possible,"  says  his  biographer 
Nevinson,  "that  the  disease  served  in  some  way  to  increase  his 
eager  activity,  and  fan  his  intellect  into  keener  Hame."  "He 
wrote  his  finest  and  sublimest  works  when  his  health  was  gone." 
(Carlyle.) 

"The  Song  of  the  Bell"  was  written  in  1799. 

"His  face  expressed  a  fiery  ardor.  *  *  *  His  enthusi- 
asm clothed  the  universe  with  grandeur.  *  *  *  His  was 
an  imagination  never  weary  of  producing  grand  or  beautiful 
forms."     (Carlyle.) 

His  biographers  tell  us  that  he  had  an  inexhaustible  fund 
of  cheerfulness  and  hope.  Difficulties  were  thrown  off,  disap- 
pointments left  behind.  Before  the  critics  had  time  to  say  their 
worst  of  one  work,  he  was  borne  far  beyond  their  reach  by 
enthusiasm  over  the  creation  of  the  next. 

"Some  fortunate  gift  of  temperament  lifted  him,"  says 
Meister,  "like  a  god." 

"Inspired  by  hope  and  an  unquestioning  confidence  in  the 
objects  of  his  enthusiasm,  in  their  sufficiency  and  ultimate 
triumph,  he  passed  unscathed  amidst  the  perils  of  indolence, 
hesitation  and  despair,  as  well  as  through  the  ordinary  trials  of 
poverty,  sickness,  and  failure.     He  seemed  to  bear  a  charmed 


14  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

life,  and  the  enchantment  passed  from  him  to  others.  (So  we  have 
seen  it  was  with  Keats  too.)  Eager  and  unresting  in  the  pur- 
suit of  his  ideals,  'a  new  and  more  complete  man  every  week,' 
he  seemed  to  diffuse  energy  and  enthusiasm  as  he  went." 

He  was  the  inspiring  friend  of  Goethe,  whose  mind  was  of 
a  grander  type.  "Schiller's  influence  supplied  the  main  impulse." 
This  connection  with  a  genius  higher  than  his  own  (a  fact 
graciously  acknowledged  by    himself)  has  consecrated  him. 

"It  was  his  'inexhaustible  cheerfulness,'  this  blessing  of  a 
sanguine  and  yet  not  impatient  temperament,  that  more  truly 
than  his  intellectual  ability  was  the  secret  of  his  success.  It  was 
this  that  upheld  him  in  the  midst  of  trials  under  which  men  of 
far  higher  natural  powers  have  often  fallen.  It  was  this  that 
enabled  him  to  withstand  the  innumerable  cares  and  temptations 
that  beset  the  paths  of  the  man  of  letters.  The  irregularity  of 
his  work  neither  drove  him  to  dissipation  nor  reduced  him  to 
impotence.  Even  in  his  rare  intervals  of  enforced  and  tedious 
leisure  he  did  not  allow  himself  to  despair  altogether  of  his  art. 
Even  under  the  stress  of  writing  for  money  he  could  forget  to 
be  mercenary  and  remain  an  artist.  Undaunted  by  the  indif- 
ference of  the  ordinary  world  and  the  small  apparent  effect  of 
things  poetical,  he  retained  his  high  belief  in  the  ultimate  value 
of  beauty  in  thought  and  word." 

"His  life  was  a  kind  of  fever."     ( Far j eon). 
At  the  time  of  his  death  his  power  of  tragic  conception  and 
dramatic  execution  was  at  its  highest. 

The  hectic  afflatus  of  the  actively  tuberculous  creative  genius 
is  almost  incessant  and  he  is  nearly  always  astonishingly  prolific. 
The  inspiration  of  the  non-phthisical  genius  is  intermittent,  his 
work  is  more  deliberate,  he  does  not  burn  the  candle  at  both 
ends,  he  is  normal  and  works  sanely.  The  wheels  are  not  con- 
tinually in  motion. 

Johann  Wolfgang  von  Goethe. — At  the  age  of  nineteen 
(July,  1768),  Goethe  had  a  severe  pulmonary  hemorrhage,  from 
which  he  made  a  very  slow  recovery  and  was  thought  to  be  con- 
sumptive. (Sime).  In  November,  1830,  he  suffered  another 
violent  hemorrhage.  This  was  a  little  more  than  a  year  before 
his  death,  which  occurred  March  22,  1832.  (Lewes.)  His  only 
son  died  in  1830  of  a  "decline." 

Goethe  enjoyed,  apparently,8  exceptionally  good  health  dur- 

8  Goethe  probably  would  come  under  the  fourth  type  of  Norman 
Bridge's  classification.     (See  his  "Tuberculosis.") 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  1 5 

ing  the  productive  period  of  his  career.  Curiously  enough,  when 
he  seemed  to  have  left  his  own  early  tuberculosis  behind  him, 
he  still  felt  the  influence  of  the  disease  vicariously,  through 
Schiller,  as  we  have  seen.  We  may  rest  assured,  however,  that 
the  "latent"  lesion  supplied  quite  a  few  by-products. 

Robert  Louis  Balfour  Stevenson. — In  Stevenson  we  find  a 
striking  example  of  the  spes  phthisica.  The  immediate  cause  of 
his  death  was  cerebral  apoplexy,  but  for  years  he  had  suffered 
from  tuberculosis  and  had  done  his  best  work  during  this  period 
of  pathology.  The  occasional  notes  of  despondency  in  Steven- 
son's letters  from  Vailima  seem  to  have  coincided  with  periods  of 
temporary  improvement.  The  literary  work  that  he  did  at  such 
times  was  not  great,     (e.  g.,  "St.  Ives.") 

When  the  disease  again  gains  the  upper  hand  we  have  "Weir 
of  Hermiston,"  which  promised  to  be  his  greatest  work,  accord- 
ing to  himself  and  the  critics  too.  He  did  not  live  to  finish  it. 
Then,  when  very  near  the  grave,  "he  was  buoyant  and  happy." 
("Letters.") 

Stevenson  was  an  optimist — if  ever  there  was  one,  and  a 
dreamer,  a  transcendentalist.  He  would  like  to  have  us  believe 
that  "no  man  lives  in  the  external  truth,  among  salts  and  acids; 
but  in  the  warm,  phantasmagoric  chamber  of  the  brain,  with  the 
painted  windows  and  the  storied  walls."  Who  can  say  he  was 
not,  at  the  particular  moment  that  he  wrote  the  above,  patholog- 
ically inspired?  The  reader  will  reflect,  might  not  such  things 
be  written  by  one  not  influenced  by  the  spes  phthisica?  Yes, 
but  so  is  it  conceivable  that  "Kubla  Khan"  might  have  been 
written  by  some  one  not  under  the  influence  of  a  drug,  yet  no 
one  questions  the  relation  of  drug  effects  to  the  character  of 
certain  of  Coleridge's  productions.  The  latter  illustration  is 
quite  obvious,  our  contention  relatively  subtle.  There  is,  really,  as 
little  reason  for  questioning  the  tuberculosis  factor  in  the  case 
of  Stevenson  as  for  questioning  the  inspiration  of  religious 
feeling  with  respect  to  the  paintings  of  Fra  Angelico. 

"But  it  was  not  only  the  many  delightful  qualities  of  his 
written  work  which  made  Stevenson  the  best  loved  writer  of  his 
time;  even  more,  perhaps,  he  was  endeared  to  countless  readers 
by  the  frank  revelation  of  a  most  engaging  personality,  which 
shines  through  all  his  works — of  a  serene,  undaunted  cheerful- 
ness    *     *     *." 

Sidney  Lanier. — Our  greatest  lyric  poet  since  Poe  is  a  per- 
fect type  of  the  tuberculous  genius.    He  produced  nothing  of  any 


l6  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

consequence  until  after  he  became  afflicted.  His  work  improved 
as  his  malady  advanced,  and  his  greatest  work,  "Sunrise,"  was 
composed  on  his  death-bed  (1881).  Making  all  allowance  for 
natural  improvement  in  technique  and  for  increased  intellectual 
breadth,  we  cannot  summarily  dismiss  consideration  of  the 
phthisical  element.  It  stirred  his  soul  into  expression  in  the 
beginning  and  as  time  passed  on  became  more  and  more  excita- 
tive.   "The  fire  in  the  flint  showed  not  until  it  was  struck." 

Early  in  1874,  Lanier,  then  greatly  wasted,  having  been 
tuberculous  since  January,  1868,9  a  period  of  six  years,  wrote  to 
his  wife :  "So  many  great  ideas  for  art  are  born  to  me  each  day, 
I  am  swept  away  into  the  land  of  All-Delight  by  their  strenuous 
sweet  whirlwind ;  and  I  find  within  myself  such  entire,  yet  hum- 
ble, confidence  of  possessing  every  single  element  of  power  to 
carry  them  all  out,    *    *    *     I  do  not  understand  this." 

Lanier's  mother  died  of  tuberculosis. 

No  tuberculous  genius  has,  himself,  so  well  expressed  the 
psychology  of  the  tuberculous.  Thus,  in  1873,  he  writes  to  his 
wife  from  Texas :  "Were  it  not  for  some  circumstances  which 
make  such  a  proposition  seem  absurd  in  the  highest  degree,  I 
would  think  that  I  am  shortly  to  die,  and  that  my  spirit  hath 
been  singing  its  swan-song  before  dissolution.  All  day  my  soul 
hath  been  cutting  swiftly  into  the  great  space  of  the  subtle, 
unspeakable  deep,  driven  by  wind  after  wind  of  heavenly  melody. 
The  very  inner  spirit  and  essence  of  all  wind-songs,  sex-songs, 
soul-songs  and  body-songs  hath  blown  upon  me  in  quick  gusts 
like  the  breath  of  passion,10  and  sailed  me  into  a  sea  of  vast 
dreams,  whereof  each  wave  is  at  once  a  vision  and  a  melody." 

Pathological,  of  course.  This  man's  children  were  badly 
off  for  the  necessaries  when  he  wrote  the  lines  just  quoted,  yet 
he  was  in  the  seventh  heaven. 

Later  he  wrote  again  to  his  wife:  "Know,  then,  that 
disappointments  were  inevitable,  and  will  still  come  until  I  have 

9  There  are  reasons  for  believing  that  his  tuberculosis  dated  from  1865. 

10  Compare  Shelley's  "Ode  to  the  West  Wind"  (see  Shelley  sketch)  : 

"Make  me  thy  lyre,  even  as  the  forest  is: 

What    if    my    leaves    are    falling   like    its   own! 
The  tumult  of  its  mighty  harmonies 

Will   take   from   both  a   deep   autumnal   tone, 
Sweet  though  in  sadness.     Be  though,  spirit  fierce, 
My   spirit!    be   thou    me,    impetuous   one! 

Drive  my  dead  thoughts  over  the  universe 
Like  withered  leaves  to_  quicken  a  new  birth; 

And,  by  the  incantation  of  this  verse, 
Scatter,   as   from  an  unextinguished  hearth 

Ashes  and  sparks,  my  words  among  mankind! 
Be  through  my  lips  to  unawakened  earth 
The   trumpet  of  a  prophecy!      O   wind, 

If  winter  comes,  can  spring  be  far  behind?" 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  17 

fought  the  battle  which  every  great  [sic]  artist  has  had  to  fight 
since  time  began.  This — dimly  felt  while  I  was  doubtful  of  my 
own  vocation  and  powers — is  clear  as  the  sun  to  me  now  that  I 
know,  through  the  fiercest  tests  of  life,  that  I  am  in  soul,  and 
shall  be  in  life  and  utterance,  a  great  poet." 

Clearly  written  in  a  pathologically  exalted  frame  of  mind. 
To  ascribe  such  utterances  to  any  other  cause  would  be  unchari- 
table. One  must  have  something  besides  genius  in  him  to 
write  so,  even  to  one's  wife. 

These  exalted  ideas  were  not  limited  to  his  poetry.  In  1873 
he  wrote  to  his  father:  "Several  persons,  from  whose  judgment 
there  can  be  no  appeal,  have  told  me  *  *  *  that  I  am  the 
greatest  flute-player  in  the  world;     *     *     *." 

He  compares  himself  with  Schubert  and  Schumann  in  music 
and  with  Keats  in  poetry.  Swinburne  was  presumably  inferior: 
"He  invited  me  to  eat;  the  service  was  silver  and  gold,  but  no 
food  therein  save  pepper  and  salt."  Of  William  Morris  he  said : 
"He  caught  a  crystal  cupful  of  the  yellow  light  of  sunset,  and 
persuading  himself  to  dream  it  wine,  drank  it  with  a  sort  of 
smile."  Again :  "Whitman  is  poetry's  butcher.  Huge  raw  collops 
slashed  from  the  rump  of  poetry,  and  never  mind  gristle — is  what 
Whitman  feeds  our  souls  with."  And  the  trouble  with  Poe  was, 
he  did  not  know  enough.  "He  needed  to  know  a  good  many 
more  things  in  order  to  be  a  great  poet." 

The  foregoing  quotations  are  too  evidently  odious  compari- 
sons with  a  certain  member  of  the  poet's  guild ;  and  all  of  them 
show  pathological  exaltation.  Remember  that  he  wrote  these 
things;  they  were  not  verbal  quips. 

"Sunrise,"  the  last  completed  poem,  written  in  December, 
1880,  when  the  poet  was  rapidly  approaching  his  end,  was  com- 
posed at  a  time  when  he  was  running  a  temperature  of  1040. 
It  is  considered  "the  culminating  poem,  the  highest  vision  of 
Sidney  Lanier."  He  was  then  unable  to  lift  his  hand  and  was 
being  fed  by  his  attendants. 

"What  he  left  behind  him  was  written  with  his  life-blood. 
High  above  all  the  evils  of  the  world  he  lived  in  a  realm  of  ideal 
serenity,"  writes  William  Hayes  Ward. 

Ralph  Waldo  Emerson. — The  father  of  Emerson  died  at 
forty-two  of  "a  consuming  marasmus,"  vainly  combated  for 
some  months.  Ralph  Waldo  himself  was  a  slender,  delicate 
youth  (Hill).  He  was  not  vigorous  in  body  as  a  schoolboy 
(Loring).     There   was   a    family   tendency   to   "chest-disease." 


I?,  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

(James  Elliott  Cabot,  p.  219,  vol.  I,  "A  Memoir  of  R.  W.  E.") 
A  study  of  Emerson's  portraits  reveals  certain  stigmata  of  the 
phthisical  habit:  narrow  chest,  sloping  shoulders,  small  thorax. 
Although  nearly  six  feet  in  height  he  weighed  only  about  140 
pounds  when  fully  matured  and  in  his  best  health.  He  is 
described  as  being  somewhat  stooped,  or  round-shouldered.  We 
may  infer  that  the  prominence  of  the  alse  scapulae  described  by 
all  clinicians  from  Hippocrates  downward  as  one  of  the  stigmata 
of  tuberculosis  was  partly  responsible  for  this.  Throughout  his 
life  his  health  was  precarious  and  even  at  his  best  he  was 
"oppressed  by  a  feeling  of  physical  insufficiency." 

Thirty  was  the  critical  age  with  all  the  Emerson  brothers. 
Ralph  Waldo's  health  breaking  in  1826,  he  spent  the  winter  and 
spring  of  1826-7  in  the  Southern  States.  His  health  had  not 
permitted  him  to  take  the  regular  course  at  the  Theological 
School  in  1823  and  he  had  been  merely  "approbated  to  preach." 

One  of  Emerson's  biographers  tells  us  that  as  a  boy  he  was 
never  seen  to  run.  The  brothers  Edward  and  Charles  both  died 
at  about  the  age  of  thirty. 

In  1 83 1  Emerson's  first  wife  died  of  consumption  and  he 
again  found  himself  broken  in  health.  He  spent  seven  months 
of  1833  in  Europe  with  apparent  recovery. 

There  is  some  suggestive  correspondence  belonging  to  the 
1826-7  period.  "It  would  give  me  great  pleasure  to  be  well," 
he  writes  in  September,  1826.  He  was  then  too  weak  to  take 
any  exercise.  To  William  Emerson  he  writes  on  January  6, 
1827,  from  Charleston,  S.  C. : 

"I  have  but  a  single  complaint,  a  certain  stricture  on  the 
right  side  of  the  chest,  which  always  makes  itself  felt  when  the 
air  is  cold  or  damp,  and  the  attempt  to  preach,  or  the  like  exertion 
of  the  lungs,  is  followed  by  an  aching." 

From  Alexandria,  D.  C,  he  writes  to  his  aunt  on  May  15, 
1827: 

"I  am  waiting  here  in  pleasant  durance  until  the  sun  will 
let  me  go  home.  For  I  am  too  delicate  a  body  to  brave  the 
northeast  winds  with  impunity.  If  I  told  you  I  had  got  well, 
I  believe  I  deceived  you  and  myself.  For  I  am  not  sure  I  am  a 
jot  better  or  worse  than  when  I  left  home  in  November ;  only  in 
this,  that  I  preached  Sunday  morning  in  Washington  without 
any  pain  or  inconvenience.  I  am  still  saddled  with  the  demon 
stricture,  and  perhaps  he  will  ride  me  to  death.  I  have  not  lost 
my  courage,  or  the  possession  of  my  thoughts.     *     *     *" 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  19 

To  William  he  writes  again,  this  time  from  Boston,  under 
date  of  June  24,  1827 : 

"I  am  all  clay,  no  iron.  I  meditate,  now  and  then,  total 
abdication  of  the  profession,  on  the  score  of  ill  health.  It  is 
now  the  evening  of  the  second  Sunday  that  I  have  officiated  all 
day  at  Chauncey  Place.  Told  them  this  day  I  won't  preach  next 
Sunday,  on  that  account.  Very  sorry — for  how  to  get  my  bread  ? 
Shall  I  commence  author.  Of  prose  or  of  verse?  Alack,  of 
both  the  unwilling  Muse.  Yet  am  I  no  whit  the  worse  in 
appearance,  I  believe,  than  when  in  New  York,  but  the  lungs  in 
their  spiteful  lobes  sing  sexton  and  sorrow  whenever  I  only  ask 
them  to  shout  a  sermon  for  me.     *     *     *" 

Still  later  he  writes  to  William  from  Cambridge,  August  31, 
1827: 

"I  am  going  to  preach  at  Northampton  for  Mr.  Hall,  a  few 
weeks.  His  church  is  a  small  one,  and  I  shall  be  able  to  preach 
all  day,  I  suppose,  without  inconvenience.  *  *  *  I  am  not 
so  well  but  that  the  cold  may  make  another  Southern  winter 
expedient." 

December  14,  1827 :  "*  *  *  My  health  quite  the  same 
stupid  riddle  it  has  been." 

February  8,  1828:  "*  *  *  I  am  living  cautiously; 
yea,  treading  on  eggs,  to  strengthen  my  constitution.  It  is  a 
long  battle,  this  of  mine  betwixt  life  and  death,  and  it  is  wholly 
uncertain  to  whom  the  game  belongs.     *     *     *" 

April  30,  1828 :  "*  *  *  Am  said  to  look  less  like  a 
monument  and  more  like  a  man.  *  *  *  Especially  I  court 
laughing  persons,  and  after  a  merry  or  only  a  gossiping  hour, 
when  the  talk  has  been  mere  soap-bubbles,  I  have  lost  all  sense 
of  the  mouse  in  my  chest     *     *     *." 

He  was  not  subjected  to  any  formal  examination  by  the 
ministerial  council  which  "approbated"  him  to  preach.  He  once 
said  that  he  would  not  have  been  able  to  qualify  had  an  exami- 
nation been  held.  It  may  be  that  the  council  was  merciful, 
believing  that  the  young  man  had  not  long  to  live  and  work. 
Here  we  may  say  that  Emerson  never  acquitted  himself  well  in 
any  kind  of  college  work.  In  mathematics  he  was  a  self-con- 
fessed "dunce."  He  knew  literature,  however,  as  hardly  any 
other  man  had  ever  been  known  to  know  it  before.  We  may 
look  equally  to  his  semi-invalidism  as  to  his  temperament  and 
bent  of  mind  for  an  explanation  of  these  things. 

The  insanity  of  his  brother  Edward  appears  to  have  been 


20  ARTHUR    C.    JACOBSON. 

of  the  tuberculous  type  first  noted  by  Esquirol  and  later  dis- 
cussed by  Mickle  in  his  Gulstonian  lectures.  Baldwin,  McCarthy 
and  Clouston  also  recognize  such  a  type.  It  occurred  in  the 
course  of  his  "decline."  He  recovered  from  it  (the  insanity)  but 
continued  to  decline  and  died  a  few  years  afterward  of  con- 
sumption. 

The  question  naturally  suggests  itself:  how  much  of 
Emerson's  intense  and  characteristic  optimism11  was  patholog- 
ical? Apparently  paradoxical,  the  idea  of  pathological  optimism 
is  conceivable  in  Emerson's  case — pathological,  of  course,  in 
respect  of  toxinic  influence,  since  optimism,  per  se,  is,  of  course, 
never  associated  with  the  idea  of  abnormality.  Even  if  unjusti- 
fied in  point  of  fact,  we  applaud  it  almost  always  as  a  splendid 
human  trait  in  a  world  of  trouble.  There  were  periods  in 
Emerson's  life  when,  sorely  tried  by  poverty,  by  his  own  illnesses, 
and  by  the  Nemesis  of  disease  which  hung  over  his  whole  family, 
he  had  about  as  much  reason  to  be  pessimistic  as  any  man  ever 
had,  yet  we  find  but  slight  evidence  of  anything  in  all  his  life 
save  almost  transcendental  cheerfulness  and  hope.  Once,  when 
his  brother  lost  his  reason,  do  we  find  him  voicing  doubt  in  a 
letter  to  his  aunt.  Again,  in  his  journal,  he  speaks  of  his  peev- 
ishness and  poor  spirit.  We  must,  of  course,  take  into  account 
his  fundamental  temperament,  his  mental  equipment  and  educa- 
tion and  his  singularly  beautiful  home  training  in  estimating 
these  things.  Yet  we  cannot  ignore  his  phthisical  habit  in  the 
light  of  Cohnheim  and  Osier's  understanding  of  that  condition. 
This  hypotrophy,  as  Jaccoud  calls  it,  or  abionergy,  to  use  Solis- 
Cohen's  term,  must  first  be  reckoned  with  in  studying  his  early 
life;  then,  later,  account  must  be  taken  of  the  actual  bacillary 
stage  that  supervened  in  1826.  The  micrococcal  stage,  or  true 
consumption,  he  never  reached. 

Emerson's  tremendous  influence  upon  modern  thought  and 
life  has  been  most  adequately  stated  by  President  Eliot. 

Honor  e  de  Balzac. — The  greatest  of  novelists  died  of  neph- 
ritis. There  was  a  cardiac  complication  which  two  physicians  pro- 
nounced hypertrophy  in  1849.  After  his  death,  another  physi- 
cian, who  had  been  friend  and  medical  adviser  for  many  years, 
when  asked  to  give  a  statement  as  to  the  causes  thereof,  named 
"a  longstanding  disease  of  the  heart  complicated  by  marked 
albuminuria"  (Dr.  Nacquart). 

However,  if  one  reads  the  "Letters,"  he  will  find  much  to 

11  Acquiescence  and  optimism  constituted  his  whole  philosophy.     So  he 
declared  in  a  letter  to  Carlyle. 


TUBERCULOSIS   AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  21 

more  than  justify  the  suspicion  that  this  creator  of  2,000 
characters,  50  volumes,  and  of  at  least  325  separate  and  titled 
creations  (424?)  also  suffered  from  tuberculosis. 

The  heart  disease  is  described  as  "simple"  hypertrophy. 
Probably  it  was  secondary  to  the  nephritis.  Aneurism  is  also 
mentioned.  Arteriosclerosis  suggests  itself  in  this  connection. 
The  heart  lesion  probably  accounts  for  the  long  duration  of  the 
pulmonary  affection,  in  accordance  with  well  known  clinical  facts. 

Gould,  in  his  brilliant  "Biographic  Clinics,"  has  shown  very 
convincingly  the  influence  exerted  by  eyestrain  upon  Balzac's 
literary  life  and  pathological  history.  The  data  which  the  letters 
provide  for  Gould's  masterly  analysis  are  almost  equalled  in 
suggestiveness  by  similar  data  bearing  upon  the  topic  of  tubercu- 
losis. Here  the  author's  inductive  method  is  practically  Gould's 
method. 

Balzac  once  wrote :  "When  I  was  quite  a  young  man  I  had 
an  illness  from  which  persons  do  not  recover ;  nineteen  out  of 
twenty  die."  We  can  only  infer  what  this  illness  may  have  been, 
but  the  remark  almost  irresistibly  suggests  tuberculosis.  As  a 
boy  he  was  thin  and  puny.  At  fourteen  he  had  an  illness 
characterized  by  feverish  symptoms  which  clung  to  him 
persistently. 

"The  doctor  wants  me  to  travel  for  two  months"  (1834). 

"My  cold  is  precisely  the  same"  (1835). 

"I  have  fever  every  day"  (1835). 

"I  am  a  prey  to  the  horrible  spasmodic  cough  I  had  at 
Geneva,  and  which,  since  then,  returns  every  year  at  the  same 
time.  Dr.  Nacquart  declares  that  I  ought  to  pay  attention  to  it, 
and  that  I  got  something  which  he  does  not  define,  in  crossing 
the  Jura.  The  good  doctor  is  going  to  study  my  lungs.  This 
year  I  suffer  more  than  usual"  (1836). 

"My  health  is  extremely  bad"  (1836). 

"Physical  strength  is  beginning  to  fail  me"  (1836). 

"My  forces  are  being  exhausted  in  this  struggle ;  it  is  lasting 
too  long;  it  is  wearing  me  out"  (1836). 

"*  *  *  A  nervous  sanguineous  ( !)  attack.  I  was  at 
death's  door  for  a  whole  day"  (1836). 

"All  the  mucous  membranes  are  violently  inflamed"  (1836). 

"I  entered  the  garret  where  I  am  with  the  conviction  that 
I  should  die  exhausted  with  my  work"  (1836). 

"I  am  ordered  to  go  to  Touraine  for  a  month  to  recover 
life,  and  health"    (1836). 


22  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

"I  must  submit  to  physicians,  humbly,  or  I  shall  quickly  be 
destroyed"   (1836). 

"Touraine  has  given  me  back  some  health"  (1836). 

"Then,  after  getting  over  that  semi-ridiculous  illness 
("cholerine"),  I  was  seized  by  the  grippe,  which  kept  me  ten 
days  in  bed"  (1837). 

"This    illness    has    made    me    lose    six    irreparable    weeks" 

(1837). 

"I  ended  by  getting  an  inflammation  of  the  lungs,  and  I 

came  to  Touraine  by  order  of  the  doctor,  who  advised  me  not  to 

work,  but  to  amuse  myself,  and  walk  about.     *     *     *     As  for 

working,  that  is  impossible;  even  the  writing  of  these  few  lines 

has   given    me    an    intolerable    pain    in    the   back    between    the 

shoulders ;  and,  as  for  walking,  that  is  still  more  impossible ;  for 

I  cough  so  agedly  that  I  fear  to  check  the  perspiration  it  causes 

by  passing  from  warm  to  cool  spots  and  breezy  openings.     I 

thought    Touraine    would    do    me    good.     But    my    illness    has 

increased.     The  whole  left  lung  is  involved,   and  I   return  to 

Paris  to   submit   to   a    fresh   examination"    (1837). 

"None  but  myself  know  the  good  Switzerland  does"  (1837). 

"The  moment  the  publication  of  the  last  part  of  the  'Etudes 
de  Moeurs'  was  over,  my  strength  suddenly  collapsed  *  *  * 
and  I  foresee  it  will  be  so  every  fourth  or  fifth  month.  My  health 
is  detestable,  disquieting;  but  I  tell  this  only  to  you"  (1837). 

"*  *  *  if  there  is  success,  success  will  come  too  late. 
I  feel  myself  decidedly  ill.  I  should  have  done  better  to  go  and 
pass  six  months  at  Wierzschovnia  than  to  stay  on  the  battlefield 
where  I  shall  end  being  knocked  over"  (1837). 

"Such  fevers     *     *     *     crush  me"    (1838). 

"My  situation  is  more  painful  than  it  has  ever  been. 
Doctor  Nacquart  preaches  vehemently  a  journey  of  six  weeks" 
(1840). 

"Nacquart  said  to  me  brutally  yesterday,  while  writing  his 
prescription,  'You  will  die.'  'No,'  I  said,  T  have  a  private 
god  of  my  own;  a  god  stronger  than  all  diseases'"  (1844) 
(Here  speaks  the  spes  phthisica.) 

"I  feel  young,  full  of  energy  *  *  *  before  new  diffi- 
culties" (1846). 

"I  should  have  been  dressed  differently  and  so  escaped  my 
cold"  (1846). 

"I  took  cold  at  Kiev,  which  has  made  me  suffer  long  and 
cruelly.     The  treatment  I  have  been  undergoing  for  my  heart 


TUBERCULOSIS   AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  23 

and  lung  trouble  is  uninterrupted.  *  *  *  I  have  reached  the 
stage  of  absolute  muscular  weakness  in  those  two  organs,  which 
causes  suffocation  for  no  cause  at  all.  *  *  *  However,  this 
last  cold  is  getting  better,  and  they  are  going  to  try  and  remedy 
the  muscular  exhaustion — otherwise,  the  journey  home  would 
be  very  difficult.  I  have  had  to  get  a  valet — being  unable  to  lift 
a  package,  or  to  make  any  movement  at  all  violent"  (1849). 

"I  am  as  thin  as  I  was  in  1819;     *     *     *"     (1849). 

"I  took  the  most  dreadful  cold  I  have  had  in  my  life" 
(1850).  (The  letters  record  colds,  colds,  colds,  and  grippes, 
grippes,  grippes,  over  a  period  of  twenty  years.) 

"I  have  had  a  serious  relapse  in  my  heart  trouble  and  also 
in  the  lung"  (1850).  Obiit  August  17,  1850,  at  the  age  of 
fifty-one. 

Yet  the  patient  retained  hopes  of  himself,  we  are  told  by 
Dr.  Nacquart.  Victor  Hugo  declares  that  even  a  month  before 
his  death  he  was  perfectly  confident  about  his  recovery,  and  was 
gay  and  full  of  laughter. 

He  projected  herculean  labors  when  nearly  dead.  The 
day  before  he  died  he  is  said  to  have  pleaded  with  his  physician 
to  keep  him  alive  for  six  weeks  longer,  in  order  that  he  might 
finish  his  work.  "Six  weeks  with  fever,"  he  said,  "is  an  eternity. 
Hours  are  like  days  *  *  *  and  then  the  nights  are  not  lost" 
(Houssaye). 

Gautier  dilates  upon  his  extraordinary  optimism  in  respect 
of  his  disease.   ("Portraits  Contemporains — Honor  e  de  Balzac") 

"His  vivacity  and  hopefulness  never  forsook  him  for  long. 
Even  in  his  terrible  state  of  health  in  1849  and  in  spite  of  his 
disappointment  at  the  non-appearance  of  'Le  Faiseur/  he  was 
in  buoyant  spirits"  (Sandars). 

Jane  Austen. — "The  insidious  consumption  which  carried 
her  off  seemed  only  to  increase  the  powers  of  her  mind;  she 
wrote  while  she  could  hold  pen  or  pencil,  and  the  day  before 
her  death  composed  stanzas  instinct  with  fancy  and  vigour." 
Died  July  18,  181 7. 

Edward  Fitzgerald  styled  her  "perfect."  "There  are  in  the 
world  no  compositions  which  approach  nearer  to  perfection" 
(Macaulay).  "Approached  nearest  to  Shakespeare  in  character- 
drawing"  (Macaulay — Pollock).  Goldwin  Smith  classes  her 
among  the  great  creative  minds. 

Samuel  Butler. — The  author  of  "Hudibras"  died  of  tuber- 
culosis September  25,  1680.     The  first  part  of  his  famous  work 


24  ARTHUR    C.    JACOBSON. 

was  written  at  some  time  between  1648  and  1663,  the  second 
part  about  1664,  and  the  third  part  about  1678.  It  is  probable 
that  the  type  of  pulmonary  tuberculosis  from  which  he  suffered 
was  that  which  occurs  at  or  near  middle  age  and  pursues  a  very 
slow,  chronic  course.  "He  was  of  a  sanguine  temperament." 
Butler  was  fifty  before  he  became  famous  and  was  sixty-nine 
at  the  time  of  his  death.  He  was  the  Byron  of  his  age,  in  point 
of  merited  popularity. 

Edward  Gibbon. — The  author  of  the  "Decline  and  Fall" 
impresses  upon  us  in  his  "Autobiography"  (pp.  36-1 12-219) 
that  as  a  boy  he  exhibited  "a  tendency  to  the  consumptive  habit." 
"I  have  never  known  the  insolence  of  active  and  vigorous  health." 
"The  progress  of  my  education  was  *  *  *  often  interrupted 
by  disease."  His  body  bore  many  evidences  of  the  lancet,  he 
tells  us,  mementoes  of  his  boyhood  "tendency."  (Tuberculous 
adenitis,  the  writer  presumes.) 

Francis  Beaumont. — Beaumont  and  Fletcher  were  the  "great 
Twin  Brethren"  of  the  Jacobean  drama.  Beaumont  was  born 
in  1584  and  died  in  1616,  his  life  spanning  a  bare  thirty-two  years. 
Here  was  a  productive  genius  indeed.  Drayton  ascribed  an 
elder  brother's  death  to  a  too  fiery  brain  or  overwrought  body. 
Dyce  quotes  Bishop  Corbet  as  singing  of  Francis: 

"So  dearly  hast  thou  bought  thy  precious  lines; 
Their  praise  grew  swiftly,  as   thy  life  declines. 
Beaumont  is  dead,  by  whose  sole  death  appears, 
Wit's  a  disease  consumes  men  in  few  years." 

This  "passionate  and  fiery  genius"  died  of  a  "decline,"  the 
old  writers  tell  us.  "Decline"  is  good  Old  English  for  tubercu- 
losis. It  was  good  enough  terminology  even  for  the  medical 
lights  of  that  day. 

Jean  Frangois  Marie  Arouet  de  Voltaire. — What  was  the 
disease  that  afflicted  the  wonderful  scamp  who  made  such  a 
tremendous  impression  upon  the  society  of  his  own  and  all  later 
days — mostly  for  good,  the  disease  which  made  of  him  "a  spectre, 
with  the  odour  of  an  embalmed  corpse"? 

Nowhere  in  the  mass  of  Voltairean  literature  which  the 
author  has  scanned  has  he  found  any  specific  and  definitive  pro- 
nouncement as  to  what  his  malady  really  was.  Certain  data, 
however,  permit  the  inference  of  tuberculosis.  So,  at  least,  it 
would  seem  to  the  writer,  who,  however,  may  be  considered 
biased  in  the  premises. 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  2$ 

We  know  these  things,  however.  First,  that  he  was  a  puny, 
marasmic  infant,  the  child  of  a  delicate  mother  who  died  when 
he  was  seven  years  of  age;  that  he  was  nine  months  old  before 
he  could  be  publicly  baptized ;  that  he  was  sickly  throughout  his 
long  life  and  of  wretched  constitution  (Espinasse),  and  that  he 
had  a  pulmonary  hemorrhage  on  February  25,  1778.  He  himself 
bears  ample  testimony  to  his  miserable  health,  as  in  the  letter 
quoted  by  Lord  Brougham,  when  he  speaks  of  his  "crazy  consti- 
tution:" It  was  Mme.  de  Staal-Delaunay  who  harshly  character- 
ized him  in  the  words  quoted  at  the  beginning  of  this  biographic 
clinic.  Again,  we  read  that  "his  constitution,  at  all  times 
sufficiently  robust  to  sustain  the  most  active  labors  of  the  mind, 
was  yet  too  delicate  to  bear  any  other  sort  of  excess."  Doctor 
Burney  described  him  as  follows :  "It  is  not  easy  to  conceive 
it  possible  for  life  to  subsist  in  a  form  so  nearly  composed  of 
mere  skin  and  bone."  Voltaire  remarked  to  Burney  that  he) 
Voltaire,  supposed  the  doctor  was  anxious  to  form  an  idea  of 
the  figure  of  one  walking  after  death.  Yet  "his  eyes  and  whole 
countenance  were  still  full  of  fire;  and  though  so  emaciated,  a 
more  lively  expression  cannot  be  imagined." 

When  he  was  twenty-four  the  Duchess  of  Berry  described 
him  as  "that  wicked  mummy";  and  Sainte-Beuve  tells  us  about 
his  "fleshless  grin."     His  portraits  speak  volumes  to  the  clinician. 

Baruch  Spinoza. — The  famous  Spinoza  was  for  many  years 
of  his  life  a  victim  of  tuberculosis  and  he  died  of  it  on  February 

21,  1677. 

He  has  had  perhaps  the  most  pervasive  influence  of  any 
modern  philosopher  except  Kant.  "Not  only  metaphysicians, 
but  poets  such  as  Goethe,  Wordsworth  and  Shelley,  have  gone 
to  him  for  inspiration,  and  the  essence  of  his  thought  has  been 
in  large  part  appropriated  in  the  poetic  pantheism  of  modern 
interpretations  of   nature." 

The  salient  features  of  his  temperament  were  those  which 
we  associate  with  the  spes  phthisica. 

Georges  Maurice  de  Guerin. — This  true  and  rare  genius 
lived  but  twenty-eight  years.  He  was  a  French  Keats,  in  a 
sense.  Sainte-Beuve  said  of  him :  "No  French  poet  *  *  * 
has  rendered  so  well  the  feeling  for  nature." 

Matthew  Arnold  remarks  that  "his  expression  has,  *  *  * 
more  than  Keat's,  something  mystic,  inward,  and  profound." 

Arnold  continues,  and  the  passage  is  very  significant  for  us : 
"In  him,  as  in  Keats,     *     *     *     the  temperament,  the  talent 


26  ARTHUR    C.    JACOBSON. 

itself,  is  deeply  influenced  by  their  mysterious  malady;  the 
temperament  is  devouring;  it  uses  vital  power  too  hard  and  too 
fast,  paying  the  penalty  in  long  hours  of  unutterable  exhaustion 
and  in  premature  death." 

"The  germs  of  destruction  and  premature  death  which  were 
sown  in  the  core  of  his  organism,  in  the  roots  of  life,  were 
frequently  transferred  to  his  moral  nature  *  *  *"  (Sainte- 
Beuve). 

David  Gray. — Gray  died  at  the  early  age  of  twenty-three. 
He  was  an  exceedingly  precocious  child.  "In  the  Shadows" 
were  sonnets  composed  during  the  latter  part  of  his  illness. 
"They  possess,  these  sonnets,  a  touching  and  solemn  beauty. 
*  *  *  His  poems  possess  the  distinct  individuality  of  true 
genius.  *  *  *  They  give  evidence  of  an  underlying  wealth 
of  imagination  and  sentiment,  of  a  true  and  vigorous  power  of 
conception,  and  of  a  gift  of  clear  and  strong,  yet  subtle  and 
tender,  musical  utterance." 

Henri  Frederic  Amiel. — This  "curious  projection  into  reality 
of  the  Shakespearean  Hamlet"  died  of  "heart  disease,  complicated 
by  disease  of  the  larynx"  (Laryngeal  phthisis).  "He  suffered 
much  and  long."  The  last  seven  years  of  his  life  was  a  physical 
martyrdom.  The  ''Journal  intime"  contains  many  suggestive 
passages. 

"For  the  secret  of  Amiel's  malady  is  sublime,  and  the 
expression  of  it  wonderful,"  writes  his  friend  Scherer. 

His  mother  died  when  thirty,  his  father  at  not  much  more 
than  that  age.  As  a  boy  he  was  delicate.  He  was  sensitive  and 
impressionable,  but  was  not  thought  precocious.  Through 
practically  his  whole  life  his  health  was  "low." 

On  September  n,  1873,  he  writes  in  the  "Journal"  at 
Amsterdam,  whither  he  had  gone  in  search  of  health,  about 
his  fever,  his  wasting,  and  his  throat.  All  are  worse.  Then 
he  alludes  to  his  eager  hopefulness  springing  up  afresh  after  all 
disappointments,  yet  unwarranted  by  the  experience  which  his 
reason  tells  him  is  invariably  unfavorable. 

January  2,  1875. — "Could  I  be  more  fragile.  *  *  *  I 
know  that  the  ground  is  slipping  from  under  me  and  that  the 
defence  of  my  health  is  already  a  hopeless  task." 

July  12,  1876. — "Trouble  on  trouble.  My  cough  has  been 
worse  than  ever.  *  *  *  The  process  of  demolition  seems 
more  rapid." 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  27 

April  19,  1881. — "A  terrible  sense  of  oppression.  My  flesh 
and  my  heart  fail  me." 

Here  the  life  and  the  record  terminate. 

Marie  Bashkirtseff. — "One  of  the  most  individual  characters 
in  the  literary  annals  of  the  Nineteenth  Century,"  Marie  Bash- 
kirtseff, died  of  consumption  at  the  age  of  twenty-four.  The 
paintings  which  she  left  show  great  promise,  but  the  "Journal" 
is  unparalleled  in  literature  (Gladstone).  The  disease  was 
present  throughout  her  active  intellectual  life,  for  she  had 
contracted  it  as  a  child  from  a  governess. 

At  seventeen  she  writes  that  it  is  art  alone  that  keeps  her 
alive. 

May  not  the  "intellectual '  eroticism"  which  disfigures  the 
suppressed  portion  of  the  "Journal"  be  the  psychological  equiv- 
alent of  the  factitious  sexual  stimulation  so  often  observed  in 
the  tuberculous? 

Washington  Irving. — "The  most  successful  writer  of  the 
New  World"  was  a  delicate  boy  and  showed  no  inclination  to 
study,  being  "a  dreamer  and  a  saunterer."  This  was  attributed 
to  "a  hereditary  tendency  to  pulmonary  disease."  In  1804  he 
manifested  symptoms  of  incipient  phthisis  and  spent  two  years 
in  France,  Italy,  England  and  the  Netherlands.  He  returned 
"in  improved  health." 

John  R.  Green. — The  author  of  the  "Short  History  of  the 
English  People,"  and  of  its  later  expansion,  the  "History  of  the 
English  People,"  was  afflicted  by  tuberculosis  in  1869.  During 
the  five  years  immediately  following  he  wrote  the  "Short 
History."  The  later  work  was  published  in  1878-80.  Green 
died  in  1883,  aged  forty-six.  As  a  historian  he  possessed 
"brilliant  and  extraordinary  imaginative  power,"  in  the  sense 
that  "he  threw  himself  into  the  life  of  the  distant  past  and  made 
it  live  again  in  his  pages." 

Richard  Baxter. — "Once  started  as  an  author,  Baxter 
literally  poured  out  book  after  book — great  folios,  thick  quartos, 
crammed  duodecimos,  pamphlets,  tractates,  sheets,  half-sheets, 
and  broadsides."  Orme's  list,  also  Grosart's,  shows  168  distinct 
books.  The  great  Presbyterian  divine  "was  an  extraordinary 
man.  In  his  physique  naturally  weak,  and  tainted  from  the 
outset  with  consumptive  tendencies  (continued  ill-health,  marked 
by  violent  cough  and  spitting  of  blood),  *  *  *  he  so  conquered 
the  body  that  he  did  the  work  of  a  score  of  ordinary  men  as  an 
author   alone.     Baxter   had   beyond   all   dispute   a   penetrative, 


28  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

almost  morbidly  acute  brain.     He  was  the  creator  of  our  popular 
Christian  literature." 

The  portrait  in  the  National  Gallery  shows  a  face  and  figure 
reminding  one  somewhat  of  the  wasted  Stevenson  of  Saint- 
Gaudens's  medallion  and  Sargent's  canvas. 

Charlotte  Bronte  ("Currer  Bell"). — All  of  the  Bronte  sisters 
died  of  tuberculosis.  The  brother,  Branwell,  also  died  of  the 
same  disease. 

The  girls  appear  to  have  been  of  the  precocious  type  which 
we  associate  with  the  rather  characteristic  physical  delicacy  that 
so  often,  in  the  young,  denotes  a  tendency  to  tuberculosis. 

Maria  died  in  her  twelfth,  Elizabeth  in  her  eleventh  year. 
Branwell  died  in  his  thirty-first  year,  Emily  at  the  same  age. 
Ann  succumbed  in  her  twenty-ninth  year.  Charlotte  died  on 
March  31,  1855,  aged  thirty-eight.  (In  private  life  Mrs.  A.  B. 
Nicholls). 

Here  we  have  a  remarkable  instance  of  an  entire  family 
afflicted  by  the  disease  and  three  sisters  who  reached  adult  life 
displaying  extraordinary  intellectual  faculties. 

Critics  are  somewhat  divided  as  to  who  was  the  ablest,  some 
favoring  Emily  ("Ellis  Bell").  She  possessed  a  powerful  and 
fantastic  imagination.  The  world's  verdict,  of  course,  has  been 
in  favor  of  the  author  of  "Jane  Eyre" — and  the  world  is  usually 
right.     Ann   ("Acton  Bell")   is  ranked  third. 

Matthew  Arnold  declared  that  for  passion,  vehemence,  and 
grief,  Emily  had  had  no  equal  since  Byron.  Charlotte  possessed 
a  great  insight  into  character,  a  fiery  imagination,  and  "an 
extraordinary,  indeed  astonishing,  power  of  expressing  passion, 
with  an  equal  power  of  giving  reality  to  her  pictures  which 
transfigures  the  commonest  scenes  and  events  in  the  light  of 
genius." 

What  figures,  real  or  imaginative,  could  be  more  pathetic 
than  the  fragile  little  Bronte  children,  dedicated  from  birth  to 
the  great  white  plague.  Think  of  them  in  their  lonely  walks 
over  the  great  moors  which  stretched  about  their  father's  gloomy 
rectory,  with  absolutely  no  companions  and  no  childish  joys. 
Yet  what  a  victory  did  they  snatch  from  their  death,  as  they 
wasted  and  wore  away.  Where  is  the  sting  of  such  a  death? 
Whose  the  real  victory?  "Give  me  thy  body,"  says  Tuberculosis 
to  Genius,  "and  I  will  give  thee  Immortality,  an  immortality 
more  sure  than  any  promised  by  the  theologians.  Thou  shalt 
be  enshrined  forever  in  posterity's  heart  and  brain.    Thou  must, 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE  CREATIVE  MIND.  29 

in  any  case,  later  or  sooner,  die  of  some  disease  or  hurt.  What 
matters  it  physically  whether  it  be  tuberculosis  at  thirty-eight 
or  apoplexy  at  seventy-eight?  What  it  matters  intellectually  is 
of  an  import  indeed  tremendous.  Shall  such  an  exchange  be 
rated  unfair  to  thee  or  to  mankind?  And  mankind  must  be 
afflicted  if  thou  art  to  be  infected.  Ah,  well,  mankind  must  pay 
well  for  its  highest  genius.  Too  dearly,  say'st  thou?  Nay,  not 
so.     'Upon  such  sacrifices  the  gods  themselves  throw  incense.'  " 

Jean  Jacques  Rousseau. — There  is  some  obscurity  as  to  just 
what  caused  the  death  of  Rousseau.  Morley  inclines  to  the 
suicide  theory. 

"He  was  born  dying,  and  though  he  survived  this  first  crisis 
by  the  affectionate  care  of  one  of  his  father's  sisters,  yet  his 
constitution  remained  infirm,  sickly,  and  disordered." 

He  refers  in  the  "Confessions"  to  the  ill-health  of  his  youth. 

In  1733,  when  about  twenty-one  years  of  age,  Rousseau's 
health  began  to  show  signs  of  a  complete  breakdown.  He 
became  very  weak,  suffered  from  palpitation  and  shortness  of 
breath,  and  had  pulmonary  hemorrhages.  He  suffered  from  a 
slow  feverishness,  from  which  he  never  afterward  became  en- 
tirely free.  "His  mind,"  says  Morley,  "was  as  feverish  as  his 
body,"  a  suggestive  comment,  indeed. 

John  Ruskin. — "The  writer  of  the  Victorian  era  who  poured 
forth  the  greatest  mass  of  literature  upon  the  greatest  variety 
of  subjects"  possessed  an  "organization  of  abnormal  delicacy." 
At  sixteen  he  had  a  sharp  attack  of  pleurisy.  At  twenty-one, 
while  at  Oxford,  he  had  an  alarming  hemorrhage  from  the 
lungs.  His  University  career  was  thus  suddenly  broken.  "For 
nearly  two  years  he  was  dragged  about  from  place  to  place,  and 
from  doctor  to  doctor,  in  search  of  health."  He  had  a  series 
of  "fevers"  while  in  Italy  and  the  Alps.  Immediately  upon  his 
marriage  his  pulmonary  disease  again  became  alarmingly  mani- 
fest (April  10,  1848).     He  remained  invalided  until  August. 

Ruskin  wrote  more  than  eighty  distinct  works  upon  subjects 
comprising  "Mountains,  Rivers  and  Lakes ;  about  Cathedrals  and 
Landscapes;  about  Geology;  about  Minerals,  Architecture, 
Painting,  Sculpture,  Music,  Drawing,  Political  Economy,  Edu- 
cation, Poetry,  Literature,  History,  Mythology,  Socialism, 
Theology,  Morals."  He  was  indeed  "a  brilliant  and  noble 
genius  *  *  *  who  in  the  English-speaking  world  left  the 
most  direct  and  visible  imprint  of  his  thoughts." 

"Modern  Painters"  and  "The  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture" 


30  ARTHUR   C.    JAC0BS0N. 

belong  to  the  period  of  his  active  tuberculosis  and  inaugurated 
the  long  list  of  his  epoch-making  works. 

Charles  Kingsley. — We  read  in  Mrs.  Kingsley's  work  of 
the  repeated  "breakdowns"  of  Canon  Kingsley.  In  1849,  at 
thirty,  he  was  in  ill-health.  In  1864-5,  at  the  time  of  the 
Newman  controversy,  his  health  again  became  precarious.  He 
goes  to  the  continent  with  Froude.  At  Denver,  Colorado,  in 
1874,  he  has  an  attack  of  pleurisy;  in  1874-5,  he  is  "  a  shrunken 
figure."  On  November  30,  1874,  he  contracts  a  "cold,"  develops 
a  bronchitic  cough,  and  takes  to  bed  December  28.  Repeated 
hemorrhages  occur,  and  on  January  23,  1875,  he  finally  succumbs. 

Robert  Southey. — Southey  suffered  from  a  "nervous  fever" 
in  1800-1.  A  year  in  Portugal  "restored  his  health."  He  was 
then  twenty-six.  "Thalaba,  the  Destroyer,"  was  finished  during 
this  period.  Although  his  health  is  alleged  to  have  been  restored 
in  1 80 1,  Eldridge's  drawing  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery, 
made  in  1804,  shows  a  delicate  appearing  man.  The  same  may 
be  said  of  Phillips'  and  of  Hancock's  portraits. 

Nathaniel  Hawthorne. — At  the  age  of  nine  Hawthorne  met 
with  an  accident.  A  ball  struck  him  upon  the  foot  and  he  was 
severely  lamed.  He  was  kept  at  home  for  a  long  time  and  had 
not  completely  recovered  before  his  twelfth  year. 

Pickard  says :  "Nathaniel  received  an  injury  to  his  foot 
when  eight  or  nine  years  of  age,  and  was  obliged  to  use  crutches 
for  a  time.  He  later  had  an  illness  which  compelled  him  to 
resume  his  crutches." 

His  sister  Elizabeth  tells  us  that  "his  foot  pined  away  and 
was  considerably  smaller  than  the  other.  He  had  every  doctor 
that  could  be  heard  of  *  *  *  he  went  upon  two  crutches. 
Everybody  thought  that,  if  he  lived,  he  would  be  always  lame. 

*  *  *  It  was  during  his  long  lameness  that  he  acquired  his 
habit  of  constant  reading.  Undoubtedly  he  would  have  wanted 
many  of  the  qualities  which  distinguished  him  in  after  life,  if 
his  genius  had  not  been  thus  shielded  in  childhood." 

Here,  very  evidently,  is  an  example  of  localized,  joint 
tuberculosis.  The  injury  was  the  exciting  cause  acting  with 
and  upon  a  predisposing  one.  This  is  the  usual  history  in  such 
cases. 

Like  Scott,  this  "most  eminent  representative  of  a  literature, 

*  *  *  the  most  valuable  example  of  the  American  genius," 
"became  a  vigorous,  ruddy-faced,  broad-shouldered,  handsome 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE  CREATIVE  MIND.  31 

man."  Open  air  life  on  the  family  farm  at  Sebago  Lake,  Maine, 
saved  him. 

The  description  of  his  last  days,  as  given  by  Julian  Haw- 
thorne and  Mrs.  Lathrop,  is  quite  suggestive.  He  was  taken  to 
see  Dr.  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  in  March,  1864.  He  was  led 
to  think  that  the  visit  was  purely  social,  but  Holmes  had  been 
asked  to  give  the  family  some  idea  of  Hawthorne's  condition, 
which  was  giving  the  family  great  concern.  Holmes  thought 
him  to  be  suffering  from  "a  gradual  wasting  or  consumption  of 
the  bodily  organs."  This  is  not  Oslerian  diagnosis,  but  it  was 
probably  the  most  that  Holmes  could  tactfully  determine  without 
defeating  the  family's  idea  of  not  apprising  Hawthorne  of  the 
visit's  real  object. 

Robert  Pollok. — At  the  age  of  twenty-eight,  just  as  he  was 
becoming  justly  famous,  Pollok  died  of  pulmonary  tuberculosis. 
He  is  considered  to  have  shown  marked  force  and  originality, 
and  "The  Course  of  Time,"  for  so  young  a  man,  was  "a  vast 
achievement." 

Michael  Bruce. — Bruce  died  of  phthisis  at  the  early  age  of 
twenty-one.  The  "Elegy"  was  written  in  the  spring  of  1767, 
"with  death  full  in  his  view." 

"Oft  morning  dreams  presage  approaching  fate; 
And  morning  dreams,  as  poets  tell,  are  true. 
Led  by  pale  ghosts,  I  enter  Death's  dark  gate, 
And  bid  the  realms  of  light  and  life  adieu."  u 

Hannah  More. — At  all  periods  of  her  life  Mrs.  More  had 
been  liable  to  a  chronic  affection  of  the  chest,  accompanied  with 
fever.  Her  strength,  she  herself  said,  was  all  superinduced; 
"none  of  it  is  natural  to  me." 

Of  herself  she  observed  that  "she  never  felt  so  sensible 
to  the  majesty  and  beauty  of  the  Psalms,  or  so  capable  and 
desirous  of  writing  a  commentary  upon  them,  as  when  upon  a 
sick-bed."  And  "Bishop  Porteus,  whenever  he  heard  she  was 
confined  to  her  bed  by  sickness,  always  said  he  looked  for  a  new 
book  from  her." 

Pierre  Jean  de  Beranger. — "The  Burns  of  France"  tells  us 
in  his  "Memoirs"  that  in  1801  his  constitution  was  very  feeble. 
"No  one  believed  that,  pale  and  meagre  as  I  was,  I  should  ever 
attain  to  my  thirtieth  year.     My  chest  appeared  to  be  in  a  very 

11  The  reader  will  observe  a  suggestive  parallelism  between  these 
words  of  Bruce  and  certain  of  Shakespeare's  "Sonnets"  (see  the  Shake- 
speare study  which  follows). 


32  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

bad  condition,  and  my  father  was  constantly  repeating  to  me, 
'You  have  not  long  to  live,  I  shall  bury  you  soon.'  Neither  of 
us  was  affected  at  such  a  prospect."  (They  were  all  but  starv- 
ing in  a  garret.) 

Beranger  had  been  a  sickly  child.  When  he  became  famous, 
in  1813,  he  was  thirty-three  and  in  wretched  health. 

So  great  was  the  popularity  of  the  national  song-writer  of 
France  that  it  has  been  said  of  him  that  "he  was  the  only  poet 
of  modern  times  who  could  altogether  have  dispensed  with 
printing" — for  "one  man  sang  his  songs  to  another  over  all  the 
land  of  France." 

Torn  Dutt. — This  exotic  flower  of  genius  died  at  the  age 
of  twenty-one.  The  last  four  years  of  the  life  of  the  high-caste 
Hindu  poetess  were  spent  in  the  old  garden  house  at  Calcutta,  "in 
a  feverish  dream  of  intellectual  effort  and  imaginative  produc- 
tion." 

"When  we  consider,"  says  Gosse  in  his  "Memoir,"  "what 
she  achieved  in  the  last  forty-five  months  of  her  life,  it  is  impos- 
sible to  wonder  that  the  frail  and  hectic  body  succumbed  under 
so  excessive  a  strain." 

William  Ellery  Channing. — Channing's  life  tends  to  parallel 
Emerson's  in  its  physical  aspect  as  it  does  in  its  intellectual. 

The  brother  Francis  dies  in  1810  of  tuberculosis.  William 
Ellery  himself  spends  the  years  1822-3  in  Europe  because  of 
wretched  health.  He  is  now  forty-two.  The  father  had  died 
young  (in  1793,  aged  thirty-six),  leaving  a  widow  and  a  large 
family.  William  Ellery  is  afflicted  most  of  his  life  by  a  chronic 
debility  accompanied  with  fever.  William  H.  Channing,  in  the 
"Memoirs,"  alludes  to  "the  wasted  form,  thin  features  and  sunken 
eyes  of  the  preacher,  whose  spirit  seemed  about  to  cast  aside  the 
body."  Upon  his  dying  bed  the  man's  intellectual  processes  are 
exalted,  recalling  those  of  Lanier. 

The  portraits  of  Washington  Allston  and  of  Gambardella 
reveal  the  phthisical  physiognomy. 

Immanuel  Kant. — Kant  was  of  weak  frame.  He  was  barely 
five  feet  in  height.  His  chest  was  concave,  the  right  shoulder 
drawn  downward — characteristic  evidences  of  fibroid  phthisis. 
In  consequence  of  his  contracted  chest  he  suffered  from  respi- 
ratory oppression.  When  writing  the  "Kritik,"  in  1771,  his 
health  was  seriously  impaired;  later,  it  is  unceasingly  broken. 
Only  by  the  most  systematic  living  and  assiduous  care  was  he 
able  to  keep  body  and  soul  together.     He  had,  he  said,  overcome 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE  CREATIVE  MIND.  33 

a  tendency  to  cough.  His  force  of  thought  was  remarkable 
enough  to  account  for  this.  It  will  be  recalled  in  this  connection 
that  at  the  age  of  seventy  he  wrote  an  essay  "On  the  Power  of 
the  Mind  to  Master  the  Feeling  of  Illness  by  Force  of 
Resolution."  His  life  was  certainly  one  long  demonstration  of 
the  above  theorem. 

Madame  de  Stael. — She  whom  Lamartine  characterized  as 
"the  last  of  the  Romans  under  this  Csesar  (Napoleon),  who 
dared  not  destroy  her,  and  could  not  abase  her,"  died  of  "a 
general  declension  of  her  constitution."  Portal's  brochure  on 
her  "Malady  and  Death"  does  not  edify  one  very  much.12  Her 
illness  was  a  long  one,  attended  by  fever  and  wasting.  Chateau- 
briand records  that  "an  ardent  fever  animated  her  cheeks."  "Her 
features  were  kindled  with  an  animation  which  made  a  strong 
contrast  with  her  feeble  condition"  (George  Tichnor).  Fler 
brilliant  intellect  was  vivacious  to  the  last.  She  would  come 
home  exhausted  from  evening  gatherings  where  she  had  been 
more  brilliant  than  ever. 

Thus  the  clinical  picture  as  presented  by  her  biographers 
suggests  tuberculosis  and  nothing  else. 

"Thomas  Ingoldsby'3  (Richard  Harris  Barham). — The 
author  of  the  "Ingoldsby  Legends"  was  "endowed  with  a  san- 
guine temperament  and  an  indefatigable  power  of  work." 

The  "Legends"  were  published  collectively  in  1840.  The 
first  one  had  appeared  in  1837.  Barham  died  in  1845  after  a 
long  illness,  the  description  of  which  in  his  "Life  and  Letters" 
is  a  good  account  of  the  clinical  characteristics  of  laryngeal 
phthisis. 

Six  of  his  nine  children  died  during  his  lifetime. 

James  Ryder  Randall. — The  song  which  Oliver  Wendell 
Holmes  characterized  as  the  greatest  war  song  of  any  nation, 
"Maryland,  My  Maryland,"  was  written  by  Randall  at  the  age 
of  twenty-two.  Shortly  before  this  he  had  gone  into  a  "decline" 
and  had  been  forced  to  leave  Baltimore  and  find  a  refuge  farther 
south,  in  Louisiana. 

*  *  *  Some  powerful  influence  seemed  to  possess 
me,  and  almost  involuntarily  I  proceeded  to  write  the  song  of 
'My  Maryland.' 

"I  remember  that  this  idea  seemed  to  take  shape  as  music 
in  my  brain — some  wild  air  that  I  cannot  now  recall.    The  whole 


Friedlander,  too,  made  no  diagnosis. 


34  ARTHUR    C.    JACOBSON. 

poem  was  dashed  off  rapidly  when  once  begun.  It  was  not  com- 
posed in  cold  blood,  but  under  what  may  be  called  a  conflagra- 
tion of  the  senses,  if  not  an  inspiration  of  the  intellect.  No  one 
was  more  surprised  than  I  was  at  the  widespread  and  instan- 
taneous popularity  of  the  song  I  had  been  so  strangely  stimulated 
to  write." 

Nikolai  Vassilyevitch  Gogol. — The  father  of  modern  Rus- 
sian realism  was  afflicted  about  1837.  The  first  volume  of  "Dead 
Souls"  was  published  in  1842.  Gogol  died  at  the  age  of  forty- 
three.    He  was  one  of  the  greatest  of  Russian  writers. 

Fyodor  Mikhdylovitch  Dostoyevski. — Dostoyevski  died  in 
1881  of  "lung  trouble."  "His  power  of  psychological  analysis, 
*  *  *  especially  of  pathological  conditions,  aided  as  he  was  in 
this  by  his  complete  self-identification  with  the  *  *  *  char- 
acters depicted,  has  nothing  similar  in  all  the  range  of  universal 
literature." 

Shakespeare. — As  might  be  supposed,  naught  but  the  flim- 
siest data  exist  bearing  upon  the  medical  history  of  Shakespeare 
and  his  kin.  He  would  be  presumptuous  indeed  who  should 
pretend  to  contort  such  data  into  alleged  definitiveness.  ISlo 
sophistry,  however,  shall  be  invoked  to  convert  what  the  writer 
considers  merely  suggestive  into  the  golden  glow  of  a  factitious 
vraisemblance.  Such  a  task  were  more  worthy  of  the  literary 
metaphysicians  who  live  in  that  intellectual  country  wherein 
prevail  the  chilling  blasts  of  Baconian  "brain-storms." 

Taine,  like  many  other  commentators,  considers  that 
Shakespeare  reveals  himself  in  many  places,  particularly  in  the 
"Sonnets."  "Look  now.  Do  you  not  see  the  poet  behind  the 
crowd  of  his  creations?  They  have  heralded  his  approach; 
they  have  all  shown  somewhat  of  him." 

"We  pause  stupefied,"  Taine  continues,  "before  these  con- 
vulsive metaphors,  which  might  have  been  written  by  a  fevered 
hand  in  a  night's  delirium,     *     *     *." 

"Ah,  wherefore  with  infection  should  he  live, 

And  with  his  presence  grace  impiety, 
That  sin  by  him  advantage  should  achieve, 

And  lace  itself  with  his  society: 
Why   should   false   painting   imitate   his   cheek, 

And  steal  dead  seeing  of  his  inward  hue? 
Why  should  poor  beauty  indirectly  seek 

Roses  of  shadow,  since  his  rose  is  true? 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE  CREATIVE  MIND.  35 

Why  should  he  live,  now  Nature  bankrupt  is, 
Beggar'd  of  blood  to  blush  through  lively  veins? 

For  she  hath  no  exchequer  now  but  his, 
And,  proud  of  many,  lives  upon  his  gains. 

0,  him  she  stores,  to  show  what  wealth  she  had 

In  days  long  since,  before  these  last  so  bad. 

"Thus  is  his  cheek  the  map  of  days  outworn, 

When  beauty  liv'd  and  died  as  flowers  do  now, 
Before  these  bastard  signs  of  fair  were  borne, 

Or  durst  inhabit  on  a  living  brow; 
Before  the  golden  tresses  of  the  dead, 

The  right  of  sepulchres,  were  shorn  away, 
To  live  a  second  life  on  second  head; 

Ere  beauty's  dead  fleece  made  another  gay: 
In  him  those  holy  antique  hours  are  seen, 

Without  all  ornament,  itself,  and  true, 
Making  no  summer  of  another's  green, 

Robbing  no  old  to  dress  his  beauty  new; 
And  him  as  for  a  map  doth  Nature  store, 
To  show  false  Art  what  beauty  was  of  yore. 

"That  time  of  year  thou  mayst  in  me  behold 

When  yellow  leaves,  or  none,  or  few,  do  hang 
Upon  those  boughs  which  shake  against  the  cold, 

Bare  ruin'd  choirs,  where  late  the  sweet  birds  sang. 
In  me  thou  seest  the  twilight  of  such  day 

As  after  sunset  fadeth  in  the  west; 
Which  by  and  by  black  night  doth  take  away, 

Death's  second  self,  that  seals  up  all  in  rest. 
In  me  thou  seest  the  glowing  of  such  fire, 

That  on  the  ashes  of  his  youth  doth  lie, 
As  the  death-bed  whereon  it  must  expire, 

Consum'd  with  that  which  it  was  nourish'd  by. 
This  thou  perceiv'st,  which  makes  thy  love  more  strong, 
To  love  that  well  which  thou  must  leave  ere  long. 

"No  longer  mourn  for  me  when  I  am  dead, 

Than  you  shall  hear  the  surly  sullen  bell 
Give  warning  to  the  world  that  I  am  fled 

From  this  vile  world,  with  vilest  worms  to  dwell: 
Nay,  if  you  read  this  line,  remember  not 

The  hand  that  writ  it;  for  I  love  you  so, 
That  I  in  your  sweet  thoughts  would  be  forgot, 

If  thinking  on  me  then  should  make  you  woe. 
Or,  if  (I  say)  you  look  upon  this  verse, 

When  I  perhaps  compounded  am  with  clay, 
Do  not  so  much  as  my  poor  name  rehearse; 

But  let  your  love  even  with  my  life  decay; 
Lest  the  wise  world  should  look  into  your  moan, 
And  mock  you  with  me  after  I  am  gone." 


36  ARTHUR    C.    JACOBSON. 

As  to  time  of  writing,  the  "Sonnets"  date  from  1597- 
1603.  In  the  former  year  Shakespeare  was  about  thirty-three 
years  old.  Some  of  the  sonnets  have  been  said  by  competent 
critics  "to  relate  to  critical  circumstances  in  Shakespeare's  life, 
of  which  we  know  no  more  than  that  they  must  have  occurred 
before  1599."  They  are  unquestionably  self-revelatory,  these 
sonnets,  though  the  allusions  are  veiled.  They  were  written  in 
his  youth,  thought  Coleridge,  who,  with  Wordsworth,  believed 
in  their  autobiographical  character.  The  latter  emphatically 
declares  them  to  express  Shakespeare's  "own  feelings  in  his  own 
person." 

"*  *  *  in  some  respects  the  most  interesting  of  Shakes- 
peare's writings  [the  'Sonnets'],  as  they  tell  us  most  about 
himself."     (Garnett  and  Gosse.) 

Says  Gerald  Massey,  in  his  interpretative  book  on  the 
"Sonnets" :  "These  sonnets  have  the  authority  of  parting  words ; 
for  they  were  written  when  Shakespeare  was  ill,  as  I  understand 
him.  *  *  *  This  is  a  group  (Sonnets  63,  67,  68,  71,  72,  73, 
74,  81)  of  very  touching  sonnets.  Nowhere  else  shall  we  draw 
more  near  to  the  poet  in  his  own  person.  They  look  as  if  written 
in  contemplation  of  death.  They  have  a  touch  of  physical 
languor;  the  tinge  of  solemn  thought." 

"Shakespeare  died  of  a  fevour  *  *  *."  (From  Memo- 
randa of  Rev.  John  Ward,  vicar  of  Stratford-on-Avon  in  1662.) 
He  was  comparatively  idle  during  the  four  years  and  a  half  that 
intervened  between  the  writing  of  the  "Tempest"  in  161 1 
and  his  death.13  Halliwell-Phillips  thinks  that  he  may  have 
written  two  or  three  plays,  among  them  "Henry  the  Eighth," 
after  the  performance  above  alluded  to.  An  active  literary  career 
abandoned  at  the  age  of  forty-seven!  He  had  ceased  to  act 
about  1604,  or  twelve  years  before  his  death,  being  then  only 
forty!  His  will  was  prepared  in  January,  1616,  and  signed  in 
March,  which  commentators  believe  to  indicate  that  he  had  been 
in  poor  health  for  some  time  before  his  death  on  April  23  of  that 
year.  Moreover,  we  may  infer  that  the  visit  of  Ben  Jonson  and 
Drayton  to  New  Place,  shortly  before  his  taking  to  bed,  was  in 
the  nature  of  a  leave-taking. 

Why  the  delay  in  signing  the  will?  Did  he  still  have  hopes 
of  recovery? 

13  "Now  my  charms  are  all  overthrown, 
And  what  strength  I  have's  mine  own; 
Which  is  most  faint:" — Epilogue,  Tempest. 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND  THE  CREATIVE  MIND.  37 

"A  remarkable  phenomenon  attends  Shakespeare's  later 
dramatic  work.  This  is  his  constant  endeavor  to  diminish  the 
labours  of  composition.  In  every  play  known  with  certainty  to 
have  belonged  to  his  later  period,  'A  Winter's  Tale'  alone 
excepted,  recourse  is  had  to  some  device  tending  to  save  trouble 
to  the  author.  *  *  *  The  labour-saving  tendency  *  *  * 
is  undeniable."  "Some  portions  of  'Henry  the  Eighth'  indicate 
beyond  dispute  the  authorship  of  Fletcher     *     *     *.'*' 

The  portrait  on  the  title-page  of  the  First  Folio  edition  of 
Shakespeare  (British  Museum;  copied  from  the  original  in  oils 
of  1609)  reveals  a  poor  physique.  Aubrey,  it  is  true,  called  him 
"a  well-shap't  man." 

The  bust  on  Shakespeare's  tomb  is  not  the  original  bust 
described  in  Sir  William  Dugdale's  "History  of  the  Antiquities 
of  Warwickshire,"  prepared  about  1638.  Instead  of  the  "heavy, 
stupid  looking  man"  portrayed  in  the  present  bust  we  see  an 
individual  with  hollow  cheeks. 

Shakespeare's  daughter  Susanna  died  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
four,  his  son  Hamnet  at  the  age  of  eleven.  His  sister  Margaret 
lived  one  year,  his  sister  Ann  eight  years.  The  brother  Richard 
died  in  his  thirty-ninth  year,  the  brother  Edmond  in  his  twenty- 
seventh  year.  None  of  his  three  grandchildren  by  his  daughter 
Judith  reached  the  age  of  twenty.  The  Shakespeare  lineage 
became  extinct  in  1670,  fifty-four  years  after  the  death  of  the 
poet. 

Did  we  surely  know  that  Shakespeare  was  one  of  the  world's 
great  consumptives,  a  chapter  would  be  added  to  the  evidence 
bearing  upon  the  Baconian  "controversy"  that  to  the  writer's 
mind  would  be  strongly  indicative  of  the  authorship  of  the 
immortal  works  of  the  greatest  creative  mind  of  all  time,  for 
Bacon's  well  known  history  furnishes  no  suggestion  that  he 
suffered  from  such  a  disease  as  tuberculosis.  What  tuberculous 
genius  ever  possessed  an  "extraordinarily  unemotional  mind," 
an  "insensibility  to  emotional  sensibilities,"  "a  certain  deadness 
towards  exalted  moral  sentiment"?  Did  such  traits  characterize 
the  man  whom  Ben  Jonson  addressed  as  "Sweet  Swan  of  Avon"  ? 

III. 

While  only  a  few  literary  stars  of  the  first  magnitude  have 
been  discussed  in  this  study,  the  writer  believes  that  they  furnish 
a  more  suggestive  series  than  would  a  small  army  of  lesser 


38  ARTHUR   C.    JACOBSON. 

literary  lights.  Therefore  he  has  omitted  from  the  study  such 
types  as  Hurrell  Froude,  Richard  Lovelace,  George  Herbert, 
John  Addingtonj  Symonds,  Westcott  (the  author  of  "David 
Harum"),  "Artemus  Ward,"  Maxim  Gorky,  Adelaide  Ann 
Procter,  Joseph  Rodman  Drake,  Kirke  White,  E.  P.  Roe,  N.  P. 
Willis,  George  Ripley,  Grace  Aguilar,  Stephen  Crane,  H.  C. 
Bunner,  John  Sterling,  Henry  Timrod,  Paul  Laurence  Dunbar, 
the  historian  Harris,  Joel  T.  Headley,  Blackmore,  etc.  Were 
these  included  we  would  be  descending  from  the  high  realm 
of  genius  to  the  comparatively  commonplace  domain  of  talent, 
and  while  this  would  also  serve  our  purpose  in  no  small  degree, 
it  would  result  in  what  the  writer  suspects  very  few  people  ever 
read  through,  an  apparently  formidable  treatise. 

The  author  submits  that  the  subjects  whom  he  has  studied 
comprise  an  extraordinarily  significant  galaxy  of  creative 
thinkers.  Of  special,  peculiar  and  far-reaching  import  are 
their  messages  to  mankind,  taken  in  the  aggregate. 

That  tuberculosis  tends  to  occasion,  in  its  vicitms,  "peculiar 
characteristics,  incompatible  with  success  and  useful  labors,"  is 
a  belief  held  by  certain  medical  observers  and  philosophers. 
There  is,  of  course,  a  large  measure  of  truth  in  such  a  belief,  for 
the  shortening  of  life  alone  would,  apparently,  make  for  the 
cancelling  of  usefulness.  Yet,  if  we  take  a  large  view  of  all 
cognate  facts  bearing  upon  the  matter,  we  must  conclude  that 
the  subject  does  not  end  here.  Judging  such  facts  in  the  Emer- 
sonian spirit,  what  a  debt  we  owe  to  the  many  splendid  characters 
who  have  been  the  victims  of  this  disease!  Does  not  this 
partially  offset  the  economic  loss?  The  tuberculous  genius  may 
have  been  useless  from  the  standpoint  of  "Diamond  Jim"  Brady 
or  of  "Oily  John,"  but 

"From  his  dead  lips  a  clearer  note  is  born 
Than  ever  Triton  blew  from  wreathed  horn" ! 

We  may  concede  that  tuberculosis  does  tend  to  unfit  its 
victims  for  the  material  things  of  life,  but  we  must,  if  we  would 
strike  a  balance  of  truth,  place  over  against  this  the  fact  that, 
in  numberless  instances,  it  has  acted  as  a  most  potential  factor 
in  the  excitation  of  certain  minds  of  extraordinary  intellectual 
endowment  to  more  energetic  output,  the  quality  of  which  output 
has  been  distinctly  enhanced.  If  it  tends  to  unfit  its  victims  for 
material  success,  so  also  does  it  tend  to  quicken  and  to  inspire 
the  intellect — a  divine  compensation.    We  may  then,  with  truth; 


TUBERCULOSIS  AND   THE   CREATIVE   MIND.  39 

regard  it  as  a  "toad,  ugly  and  venomous,  which  wears  yet  a 
precious  jewel  in  his  head." 

"There  is  a  dread  disease  which  so  prepares  its  victim,  as  it 
were,  for  death;  which  so  refines  it  of  its  grosser  aspect,  and 
throws  around  familiar  looks  unearthly  indications  of  the  coming 
change — a  dread  disease,  in  which  the  struggle  between  soul 
and  body  is  so  gradual,  quiet,  and  solemn,  and  the  result  so 
sure,  that  day  by  day,  and  grain  by  grain,  the  mortal  part  wastes 
and  withers  away,  so  that  the  spirit  grows  light  and  sanguine 
with  its  lightening  load,  and,  feeling  immortality  at  hand,  deems 
it  but  a  new  term  of  mortal  life — a  disease  in  which  death  and 
life  are  so  strangely  blended,  that  death  takes  the  glow  and 
hue  of  life,  and  life  the  gaunt  and  grisly  form  of  death — a  disease 
which  medicine  never  cured,  wealth  warded  off,  or  poverty  could 
boast  exemption  from — which  sometimes  moves  in  giant  strides, 
and  sometimes  at  a  tardy  sluggish  pace,  but,  slow  or  quick,  is 
ever  sure  and  certain."14 

It  is  not  alone  the  strenuous — in  the  ordinary,  vulgar  sense, 
who  achieve  great  things.  Not  always  is  the  race  to  the  physi- 
cally swift,  the  battle  to  the  bodily  strong.  Above  these,  soaring 
toward  the  goal  of  human  greatness,  is  an  intellectual  vanguard 
whose  bodies  are  so  weak,  whose  minds  are  so  finely  organized 
and  so  subtly  stimulated,  whose  hold  upon  physical  life  is  so 
feeble,  that  it  is  given  to  them,  in  superior  degree,  to  soar  upon 
the  wings  of  fancy  into  other  worlds  where  all  is  beauty  and 
"the  air  is  music,  there  to  write  down  the  cadences  that  they 
hear.  And  these  cadences,  though  imperfect,  become  the  songs 
and  the  literary  gospel  of  the  nations."  Men  of  common  clay 
are  but  "the  pans  and  the  barrows  or  the  porters  of  the  fire" ; 
our  tuberculous  geniuses  "are  children  of  the  fire  itself,  made  of 
it,  and  only  the  same  divinity  transmuted,  and  at  two  or  three 
removes." 

14  "Nicholas  Nickleby,"  Chapter  49,  paragraph  3. 


EAGLE    PRESS,    BROOKLYN-NEW    YOEK 


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